Why Continuous Requirements Are Critical To Agile IT Project Success

Requirements Management is going through a lot of change lately. As large enterprises truly scale and adopt Agile methodologies for big, complex, global rollouts, they have traditionally been focused on the people and processes that are necessary to make this happen. 

When it comes to technology the focus has traditionally been on Rally, Jira, VersionOne and other Agile Task Management solutions. With the ability to produce more and to iterate much faster, the pressure quickly fell on the testing functions as this was the next bottleneck in the process.

Many organizations are now finding that the age-old problem of building the right solution, at the right time is still somewhat elusive. Improving the 'front-end of the process' has not been prioritized with adequate time, focus or energy. 

We know that putting all the burden on a Product Owner is difficult, if not impossible. We need to find a better way to manage the front end of the Application development process. Going back to the 'document and freeze' formal BRUF/BRD process will not keep pace with the needs of modern business. 'No requirements', 'it is in the backlog' and 'the code is proof' don't work for large complex projects. We, at Blueprint, believe that the notion of Continuous Requirements is the right direction for these enterprise Agile initiatives.

We are funding research on this topic, which we expect to have at the end of April, but it's great to see Kurt Bittner at Forrester, and Tom Murphy at Gartner, both articulating a position that it's time for more analysis, dialogue and action in this area.
Tom Murphy blogged about this just yesterday http://blogs.gartner.com/tom_murphy/2016/03/23/updating-requirements-market-guide/