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Five Reasons to Outsource Requirements Analysis

Reason #1
Outsourcing can lower the risks and improve the outcomes of large IT initiatives.

Requirements are much too important not to do right. This is borne out by the dismal results of industry studies and surveys:

31% of all software projects are canceled before completion ($81B wasted)
53% of projects will cost 189% of estimates
Projects that are actually delivered on time and on budget
- 9% in large companies
- 16% in small companies

The challenges of software development projects used to be the technology and the availability of skilled people to implement the technology. This was particularly true when software applications were written from scratch. But today this is no longer the case. Software projects today integrate and configure pre-written components from commercial off-the-shelf applications and infrastructure components. Vendors are willing and able to work through any issues that do come up with interfaces or version incompatibilities. While performance and reliability are always issues, these can usually be overcome by over-provisioning applications with hardware that becomes cheaper each year. The availability of skilled people to implement technology is being provided by fast-growing offshore software development industries in India, Eastern Europe and Malaysia.

The problems we face today are not the availability of technology or our ability to implement it. The challenges we face today are project management and understanding what we can do with the computing assets we have available. It comes down to business requirements. Do we understand how we can make use of information technology to improve the effectiveness and competitiveness of our business? Implementing technology without understanding fully the business problem your users need to solve is a fast track to disaster.

“We don't need to do requirements because we are implementing only out of the box features from the vendor's application. We implement what they give us.” – CIO of a mid-sized insurance company

Reason #2
Outsourcing can bring new best practices techniques to your organization.

Business processes in most companies and organizations grow increasingly complex year by year due to competitive pressures to add the new products and services, regulatory compliance, expansion through growth or acquisition, and any number of reorganizations. The touch points between information systems and business processes have also increased as more and more manual tasks are taken over or augmented by automation. This makes the job of understanding business operations much more complex. The skill level required by a business analyst today is much higher than it was even 5 years ago.

Most IT organizations overestimate the quality of the requirements they get from users simply because they have nothing to compare. They have been doing things the same way for so many years that they have difficulty evaluating the effectiveness of their approach. The methods of gathering and documenting requirements that worked five years ago may not be effective today because of the increasing complexity of the business and the wider range of technologies for automating business processes available. An outsourcing partner that specializes in requirements analysis and business process modeling can bring new best practices techniques into your organization.

“We don't have any trouble with requirements. We just get the users in one room and ask them what they want.” - IT Manager

Reason #3
Outsourcing can bridge the gap between the IT organization and the business organization.

In most companies the responsibility for requirements analysis and business process modeling is pushed back and forth between the business units and the IT organization. Many companies are creating a program office that reports to the COO or VP of Operations and attempts to bridge the communications gap between business management and IT systems designers. It is not an easy void to fill. Each group has its own culture and mode of approaching issues. Staff for the program office typically come from the IT organization and as a result they may not always be comfortable dealing with the executives in business management. An outsourcing partner can help the program office develop systematic methods for business process modeling and requirements analysis that will allow it to more effectively fulfill its mission.

“We shifted the responsibility for requirements over to the users. It's up to them to develop requirements.” -IT Project Manager

“I had no idea what they meant by a ‘requirement'. I still don't.” – Business Manager

Reason #4
Outsourcing can extend your requirements analysis into business processes and help identify cost effective opportunities for automation.

Most IT-driven requirements projects focus on narrow feature/function issues of a system. Typically this includes Use Cases or JAD sessions that focus on issues such as the user interface (screens for query, update and data entry), report layouts, security requirements and other design-oriented features of the system. While these requirements are important for technical specification and detailed design, they do not show how the system is supposed to support a business process. IT often presumes that the users know exactly what type of system they need, and the only open question is how the system should look and function.

A model of the overall business process can show how business processes can be re-engineered and where point solutions can have a huge impact on costs and efficiency. The best solutions are not always technical or expensive. An outsourcing partner skilled in business process modeling can help you identify where and how you can get the best return on your investment in business process automation.

“We make sure that requirements we get from users are J2EE compliant.” –VP IT

Reason #5
Outsourcing can be a cost effective way to get the skills you need when you need them (even when you don't think you do).

It can take years to develop the skills needed to do rigorous business process models and system requirements. It is a skill that is developed best through a broad range of projects and system initiatives. An outsourcing partner can bring those skills and experiences to your organization when you need them on a project by project basis or as an ongoing partnership.

“We have a very tight and disciplined method for gathering requirements. We know exactly how to do it here.” -SVP Information Technology in a large insurance company

“We need help. We need to put in place more formal methods for requirements analysis because we are all pretty new at this and not sure what we are doing.” - Project Director who reports to SVP Information Technology in a large insurance company