Overview to SINs 874-1, -2, -4, -7.
A major goal for Federal Government procurement activities is to improve the quality, timeliness, and efficiency of its products and services. We at CAI believe that one of the most effective means of making improvements to government programs or to any other organization’s projects is by adopting a process which will allow the members of the organization to clearly communicate their needs by writing good requirements. Whether the requirements are for products – new software and hardware to manage the Nation’s aviation activities (FAA), a new weapon for defense (DoD), software to process medical claims (Medicare, TRICARE) or for acquiring services – outsourcing computer maintenance, staffing a help-desk, or maintaining a facility - BAD REQUIREMENTS are the major reason for cost overruns, schedule slips, and failures.
CAI identified the problems caused by bad requirements and started to change the way people view the importance of good requirements as early as 1987, when we produced our first software tool to manage requirements. We made several major discoveries at that time – many organizations were not aware that bad requirements were the root of many of their problems (Total Quality Management helped to correct this misconception) and most organizations did not have an effective requirement development, management, nor control process for requirements.
We looked at why people were writing poor requirements and found a number of contributing factors. The biggest factor is simply that people don’t know how to write good requirements. In response to this need to teach people how to write good requirements, we developed the first of our seminars, which has been given for over eleven years to over 10,000 people in government and industry. We discovered that knowing how to write good requirements was not enough.
There was also a need to help people scope their projects before writing requirements, to help them do cost effective and useful requirement reviews, and to manage and control their requirements throughout the acquisition and implementation phases of their projects. This has resulted in a need to extend our seminars to address these areas of requirement development, management, and control. In addition, due to an increase in performance-based contracting, our customers asked us to apply our same pragmatic approach to teach them how to write performance-based statements of work (PBSOW).
At CAI, we are focused on a process that results in the development, management, and control of good requirements. We provide training, consulting, and facilitation, to aid our customers in defining, writing, managing, controlling, and verifying requirements.
While the government is often cited as having poor requirements, wasting large sums of money, or being late with projects; we think the government needs to understand that requirements are not uniquely a government problem. We have as many commercial clients as government clients and the problems we see are the same whether it is a government endeavor or a private one. There has been little published and few training classes available on the subject of scoping a project and writing good requirements. Only recently have some colleges begun to recognize this omission. CAI has evolved our training and our services to help solve the problems experienced by our customers. We will continue to evolve to meet their future needs.
Many government organizations need products and services that are not part of their normal operations and skills mix. For organizations whose job does not include the acquisition, development and deployment of information technology (IT) systems this is a particularly difficult problem. Special knowledge of project management and program integration is needed to effectively and efficiently acquire a new system or make a significant upgrade to an existing system. Many failures of government programs over the last ten years are a result of placing the onus of managing such programs on organizations that do not have the correct skills base.
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