Exility

Do you handle evolving requirements effectively?

It is well acknowledged that poor management of requirements is one of the main reasons for project failure and amongst the top reasons for poor customer experience. Despite this wide spread awareness, the industry has done little to improve effectiveness of managing requirements.

Why is effective requirements management difficult?

'Late' requirements

The requirements evolve as the users and designers 'drill down' during the course of system development because user’s initial understanding of what is required may be complete and inaccurate. However, the vendor puts a 'hard' end date for requirements phase and raises change orders when confronted with 'late' requirements. Executing the late requirements will impact project cost and schedule; not executing these will decrease the chance of user adoption.

Handshake issue

The key stakeholders in the exercise e.g., User, Analyst and Developer do not share a common understanding of the required product. The user is presented with the Requirements Document. This document, which is usually in text format, is a poor representation of the final product.

How are requirements captured in Exility?

Identification of users and analysis of the tasks that they want to perform is the first and most critical step in our approach. We will collate information on who the users are and description of the complete job that the user wants to do

Our design team comprising usability and functional experts reviews the task descriptions and translate these into visual components

Generating higher level of user involvement

Visual components show what the screens would look like dynamically, what actions the user would take, how would the screen behave in response to such specific user actions, at all points in each task. During requirements phase itself, the users get to see what they will actually use in the final product

Supporting evolution of requirements

Evolution of requirements is better supported with Exility, as movement of data between visual components and database has been automated and requires design input only. The design team can quickly make changes to the visual components according to the input from users.

Common understanding of needs

The validated visual components act as a handshake between project stakeholders. Now users, analysts and developers share a common understanding of the dynamic screen behavior. This helps reduce the number of iterations required during testing and acceptance.

Summary

Business users know what they want to achieve from the software even though they cannot anticipate how they will use new technology. But the prevailing approaches give commitment only based on what they propose to build but not on supporting all the tasks that users want to perform. With Exility, we are able to provide such commitment.