Defining A Business Need

The Value of Defining Business Needs in a Software Project

Articulating business needs may be a thorough and extensive process. almost like meticulously creating architectural designs for skyscrapers, there are multiple steps involved including the identification and understanding of a business’s goals. Defining its strategic direction and capturing any key concerns that are relevant to future challenges, risks or problems also are critical pieces of the puzzle. For a software project to run smoothly and cause a successful outcome, business needs must be addressed as early as possible.

Why is not having a well-defined business need a problem?

A software project, or maybe one feature, without a clearly specified business need, is destined to failure or to a bumpy road filled with discrepancies. Many businesses starting a replacement project, especially those at the enterprise level, either lack a well-defined business need for his or her project or their needs constantly change throughout the event process.

What does that mean for the team on the event side? How is their work affected when they’re building a product without a properly determined business need?

• Business analysts are missing an important thing to try to their work properly. When the top business need isn’t clearly defined, requirements often change on a day today.
• Developers, not knowing the business logic and therefore the problem their code is getting to solve, isn’t very productive. The code starts to supply bugs or is overall not working towards meeting the top business need. And this makes perfect sense as developers don’t have a vision over the goal of the whole project.
• QAs become overloaded with logging bugs. When testing features without the business need clearly defined at the start, they have a tendency to not know whether the feature is functioning properly or if it’s buggy. this might cause conflicts to arise and satisfaction to drop, both on the client side and within the developing team.
• Designers also see their work stumble. They spend time creating mock-ups and styles which may look great, but probably aren’t achieving the client’s desired result — whatever which will be.

When the project’s business need isn’t defined and clarified in the early stages, the product will not bring any value to the user. Even worse, it will bring unwanted value, which may cause an outflow of users and even a total collapse of the product.

Case Study

To illustrate the arguments above, let’s check out an example of what can happen when business needs aren’t properly defined.

As a part of an enormous form that users should be ready to submit, the team had to develop an easy datepicker functionality. The datepicker was alleged to be pretty simple because it may be a common feature on any application. Everyone agreed on the feature and the way it should work. The business analyst communicated that with the client, created a user story, then the team groomed it and estimated it. the planning team created some nice datepicker that was both good-looking and user-friendly. The story ended up in one of the subsequent sprints and got implemented. Everything was perfect.

Then the day of the demo came and therefore the team presented the datepicker. The client saw it and therefore the first reaction was: “Looks good, but our users are people during a hurry and a datepicker might not be so useful for them, as they only use the keyboard, not the mouse. The user should be ready to just type digits which will be formatted into a month, day, and year.”

The team agreed that this might be implemented in an upcoming iteration. Reworking the functionality would slow their work down, but they did the entire process again — design, BA, development, QA, demo.

At subsequent demo, however, the client said they wanted the feature to be a mixture of manual input and a datepicker, so users can choose which method to use. This double option had actually been discussed earlier on, but at that point, the client had disagreed completely.

This all shows how a minor “business need” like a datepicker may cause tons of confusion and remodeling. Eventually, this caused the team:

• Loss of motivation
• Frustration
• Waste of time
• Unhappy client

The whole situation was triggered by poorly- defined business needs. during this case, the client wanted the appliance to try to a variety of various things at an equivalent time and their focus attended shift constantly. Another scenario resulting in similar distress is when a project isn’t directed at any business need whatsoever. Either way, the top product will likely not live up to the users’ expectations once released.

To avoid such an outcome, companies should invest in meetings and definition sessions, consult specialists, see how the foremost successful players within the sector do things and learn from them. most significantly, they ought to stick with one business need at a time and have it well-defined, so it can serve end clients the simplest way possible.

What is the worth of defining the business need?

The case study above illustrated the tumults created by non-specified needs, so let’s have a glance at how projects actually benefit when being supported articulated business needs.

The development team is concentrated and motivated.

When the team features a good vision of the matter the merchandise they’re developing is trying to unravel, their efforts are more likely to satisfy the business need within the end. Throughout the event process, the team can reference the last word goal of the project, in order that they are focused and feel they’re serving a purpose. Hence, their motivation stays high and that they are faster and more productive in their work.

Tension within the team is reduced.

For a project to run smoothly and efficiently, tension within the team must be minimized. Keeping in mind that internal conflicts flourish when business goals are vague and priorities aren’t set properly (or shift all the time), specifying the business need proves invaluable. A healthy working atmosphere means expectations are more easily met, decisions are painlessly taken, and therefore the overall purpose isn’t a hazy concept but a destination accessible.

The client is satisfied.

With a business need well outlined already at the start, the project is sure to cause a uniform, meaningful product that will serve a specific need of the market. during this case, not only users are delighted with the new application but also the corporate owning the merchandise is thrilled about all future gains associated with it. Last but not least, for the corporate that built the app there’s hardly any greater recognition for his or her work than having a cheerful client last which will possibly come with new projects.

Conclusion

As every new beginning maybe a land filled with expectations and hopes, every new project also has an aura of optimism and anticipation. But the keenness often brings with it a way of impatience and even urgency — the project has got to get going as soon as possible and therefore the outcome must be released in no time. This hurry, however understandable from a psychological and economic point of view, must not ignore a key element: defining the business need. Determining this significant factor will indeed require time and thorough thinking, but this effort will spare the project unnecessary reworking, disputes, confusion, and, above all, potential failure.