White Papers

These white papers represent our research and thinking on important topics. Here we give you a brief summary of each of the papers. If you’d like to read the complete paper, we ask that you register with us. You only need to register once – then you can download as many papers, as many times as you like.

Establishing a Center of Requirements Excellence (CoRE) - the People Perspective
Businesses often wonder why their technology projects take longer than anticipated or end in failure. It's been statistically shown that requirements errors are at the bottom of most of these problems - either the requirements are incomplete or they aren't expressed in a way that business can understand (and therefore know what they're approving) or that developers can interpret correctly (and therefore build what will meet the business need). We believe that there are four root causes of these difficulties: people, process, technology and organization. While all are critical, let's focus first on the people issues.

Establishing Center of Requirements Excellence (CoRE) - the Organizational Perspective
CoRE is an operational infrastructure that supports a methodology and a toolset. Its focus is not just on requirements in the classic sense, but also on understanding business processes and helping to identify the need for making those processes more effective through appropriate technology projects. CoRE should be constructed in such a way that it weaves itself throughout the entire project life cycle – with strategic management, project management, and quality assuring and training initiatives.

Providing a Framework for Project Success- and Beyond
Conventional wisdom says you’ll never reach your destination if you don’t know where you’re going. However, all too often, that’s exactly how projects are implemented, most often as a result of the business and technical staff being unable to communicate their needs to each other. Extensive re-work, scope creep, missed deadlines, low morale, and required features being dropped from product releases are just some of the issues that can be traced back to a fundamental lack of understanding of the business needs. This paper outlines four critical success factors that can help projects succeed and – beyond the project – can foster continuous business improvement.

Sarbanes-Oxley Initiatives and System Architect
Now that publicly traded companies have first-year experience in reporting compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, lessons have been learned and improvement efforts are underway in anticipation of reporting compliance next year. This paper describes how one insurance company is taking a different approach to improve its SOX compliance reporting by using annotated Process Flow Maps in System Architect to document the financial risks and financial controls. With this approach, all documentation is in one database, where it can easily be accessed, updated, and shared electronically.

Moving to a Higher Maturity Level on the CMM
Technology is an enabler of most business improvements. In recognition of this simple fact, many organizations today are working to improve their software development processes. The Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM) has become a useful guide to helping those organizations. We believe that instituting what we call a “center for requirements excellence” can move your organization significantly higher on the Capability Maturity Model.

Developing New Insurance Products – a Modeling Approach
Bringing new products to market is the lifeblood of any company. But the process of developing products is time-consuming and comprehensive in its organizational scope. A new product may require work process changes in virtually every area of an organization – from home office to distributors. For insurance companies, the need to meet licensing regulations and actuarial analysis complicates the product development process even further. To invest time and effort into product analysis and development, only to be stymied by systems that won’t support the need, is frustrating, to say the least. This paper provides some suggestions for making product development more successful.

Using System Architect for Six Sigma
Six Sigma helps companies achieve virtually defect-free performance in manufacturing, design, engineering, and business processes through the use of statistical and other means. Originally, Six Sigma was only applied to "physical processes," such as those performed in manufacturing. They were easy to observe, document, analyze and measure, because it was easy to see exactly what was being done, how long it was taking, and any delays in the work flow. Six Sigma has now been expanded to include the "knowledge processes" that are not as explicit as the physical ones. The focus may change slightly, from strict measurements to clearly identifying waste in the form of delays and superfluous steps in the flow of work, but the goal remains the same – improvement. This paper explores how System Architect can be customized to support the Six Sigma approach.

Repository Gold Mine
Many organizations grapple with issues of integrating and reusing data and software requirements across the enterprise, across the system life cycle, and across planned, current, and legacy systems. If you use a tool like Popkin’s System Architect, you have access to a repository specifically designed to support modeling and model analysis and to store the huge quantities of information that analysts and designers produce. But there’s even better news: you’ve probably just scratched the surface. By knowing how to dig deeper into the repository gold mine, you can get much more than you might be aware.

Universal Data Models
Built over many years with the help of many insurance organizations around the world, the Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) model from IBM is intended to support the constructs needed by any and all insurance companies. The idea is that insurance organizations using IAA can save time and money by leveraging the use of common database structures, rather than having to reinvent the wheel each time they develop a new system. This paper discusses an extended client engagement where we helped establish a practical approach to incorporating IAA constructs.

Why Are Requirements Critical?
You’ve seen the statistics: 31% of software projects are canceled before completion; requirements errors are the largest class of errors (41%) in large projects; finding and fixing requirements errors consumes 70-85% of total project rework costs. Many requirements efforts suffer under some crucial misconceptions.  Read about how instituting a structured requirements process can address these issues.

Improving Your Requirements Gathering Process
Karl E. Wiegers in his book, Software Requirements (Microsoft Press, 1999), says, "Of all the software process improvements you could undertake, improved requirements development and management practices will likely provide the greatest benefits." But how do you go about establishing such a process? That’s what this paper covers.

Model Your Business Before You Reorganize
Downsizing, re-structuring, lay-offs, mergers, outsourcing – each takes its toll. Yet tough economic times demand that companies do more with less and look for opportunities to improve efficiency. Often that means reorganizing internally; other times it means merging with another organization. This white paper discusses the benefits of modeling your business and its processes before reorganization takes place.

Making the Case for Requirements Management Strategy
When selling a concept to management, there are only two things they understand: increasing revenues or decreasing costs. A requirements management strategy is the approach you take to gathering requirements, reviewing requirements, managing changes to requirements, tracing requirements from the business need through to implementation, and tracking the status of the requirements. This paper is an attempt to show you and your management the return on investment you can expect to achieve if you employ a requirements management strategy that’s supported by appropriate requirements specification and requirements management tools.