Monday, June 23, 2008

System Requirements Review

Completed Systems Requirement Review (SRR) on a big program last week and here are some lessons learned:

1. Know the approvers. You'd think this would be easy, but there are circumstances that complicate this. For example, when deploying a COTS product that will be deployed as a general service, who approves? Don't forget security folks!

2. Get to the approvers a minimum of two weeks ahead of time and review.

3. Leadership will provide an endless list of people that 'need to be involved'. Our SRR had over 30 people! Clearly only about 10% would really add value. Figure out who these people are and focus on them.

4. An SRR is about communicating status, not a review of requirements. Give enough detail so that the audience knows you've been in the details

5. Review the slides with the team at least a week before.

The temptation is to see the SRR as a formality, a box to check, since all the hard work has been done. While that's true to a large extent, it really represents the time from when the requirements are completed to the review - that time period is when you're formally closing with the primary stakeholders, and that's important.

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