Requirements & Requirements Management

[Webinar Recap] Why Word & Excel Are Not Enough to Manage Complex Requirements

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In this blog post, we recap a webinar discussing why Word & Excel are not enough to manage complex requirements. 

Product development is more complex today than ever before. Modern products are multifaceted and multidisciplinary, with hardware, software, and various engineering approaches coming together in the name of superior customer experience. Many industries — medical device, automotive, and aerospace and defense, for instance — also require that complex product developers adhere to rigorous safety standards and regulations. Companies must work effectively and efficiently if they’re going to keep their competitive advantage. And that all starts with requirements management.

In this webinar, experts will discuss how you can manage your requirements in a more efficient way than document and look at how to navigate between different versions (version control) and how to collaborate with your team on your requirements.

You will learn more about:

  • How using Word and Excel for requirements management introduces risk to your product development
  • The pitfalls of not having a formal requirements management solution
  • Benefits of a data-driven approach to requirements management
  • How Jama Software can help

Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.

Excel and Word Are Not Enough

Jerogen Frikken: All right. Thank you Marie for the great introduction. So today we’re going to focus on the requirement management tools and why Word and Excel just isn’t enough. We will first talk about the challenges in the pitfalls you will encounter when using a document based approach for your requirement management process. We will then show you the benefits of a data driven approach and why this is the preferred methods over a document approach. And we will end with an overview of how Jama could actually help you with this and close with a Q & A.

The development of products and the delivery of them are more complex today than ever before. Products today are having many different parts and are combining hardware, software, and various engineering approaches all together. Many industries like the medical device, automotive and aerospace and defense industry, for instance, also require that complex product developers apply to safety standards and regulations. Organizations have to work in a more efficient and […] if they want to stay ahead to their competition. Despite this, many teams are still using Word and Excel to manage requirements for these very complex products. This means they’re missing real time collaboration and insights, end to end traceability and integration with product testing.

RELATED POST: How To Write An Effective Product Requirements Document

Jerogen Frikken: Now, I am sure most of you are familiar with the term requirements management. But just in case you are not requirements management is the process of making sure you build just the right products. And for products that will have different releases or versions over time, understanding the changes to these requirements and their impact is a continuous process throughout the complete development cycle.

Basically you can view requirements management in three different ways. First, obtain and document the requirements. In a world of competing priorities and different opinions this is always a challenge and typically the responsibility of business analysts, system engineering and product owners.

Secondly, once we have documented the requirements we need to review and confirm they are the correct requirements. Are the requirements we document really what the user or the customer needs? Confirming this is often called the process of validation. And this is typically done by product managers, customers or users.

Last but not least. You may need to work with the requirements so you can confirm the teams have built the products according to the documented requirements. This process is typically called verifying the requirements or verification. Developers, testers, and quality assurance leads are key stakeholders in this process.

Watch the full webinar to learn more about Why Excel and Word Are Not Enough.

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