Requirements planning

Requirements Planning

With statistics boasting 40-60% of software failures and defects are the result of poor software management and requirements definition, it’s critical that IT organisations ensure business requirements are clearly defined during the planning process and tracked through project execution. CA Clarity PPM allows users to capture business value in the form of requirements, evaluate and prioritise these requirements into high-level release plans, and construct a road map for the release schedule (describing what will be built and when). This allows both IT and business stakeholders to graphically monitor and track changes over time.

CA Clarity PPM for ITG helps organisations:

Capture Business Value in the Form of Requirements

The first step in the requirements planning process is capturing and organising requirements (which represent your customer’s needs). A requirement includes:

• Properties
  • Define the attributes that describe your requirement and drive planning cycle decisions.
• Hierarchy
  • Manage requirements as individual requests or a group and associate them within a hierarchy of requirements.
• Dependencies
  • Indicate dependency relationships that exist between requirements.
• Processes
  • Create and run requirement-related processes.
• Audit Trail
  • Record changes to field-level attributes in an audit trail log.

Status, risk, and investment should also be captured for each requirement. Both effort and cost should be estimated to represent an organisation’s allocated amount spent to deliver a requirement. These values are displayed as aggregated totals up the hierarchy of requirements. These “scoped” requirements can also be linked to your release roadmap to ensure requirements are delivered based on relative priority.

Prioritise Requirements

This process is critical to assessing a requirement's business impact. Typically, a panel of key stakeholders meets to review the requirements under consideration for an upcoming release. The stakeholders analyse the requirements and prioritise. The rankings are edited and the overall priority is calculated.

Plan Releases More Accurately

Requirements are grouped into releases, which represent new future IT deliverables.

Releases are associated to products, applications, assets, services, projects or programmes, which represent the work to deliver the release. User-configurable tabular and graphical portlets are available to analyse release plans and requirements.

Drives higher business value and reduces project costs and failures

Construct a Graphical Release Plan Roadmap

Release plan roadmaps are graphical, time-scaled representations of upcoming releases for a product, service or other investment. The roadmap represents your organisation’s plan to release the new IT service or other investment.