Starting a Requirements Management Initiative

This paper describes one of HP Division's experiences in starting an initiative that significantly changed the way in which its managers, engineers, and marketing specialists understand and implement product requirements management.

The experiences detail how, by maturing our requirements management practices, our organization was able to address the following issues: 1) information redundancy and synchronization, 2) inconsistent documentation format and content, 3) inefficient requirements elicitation, communication, and review procedures, and 4) lack of customer focus. The paper also offers recommendations for those organizations that plan to start a similar initiative. Finally, it discusses plans to improve our requirements practices on future projects.