Investing in better software requirements is one of the highest leverage investments your organization can make. For each requirement that is incorrectly specified, companies can pay 50 to 200 times as much to correct it later in the project. And requirements work is not as simple as writing down what users want. For most projects, requirements development is not exploratory activity of helping the users determine what they really want the system to do. Without solid requirements, project predictability and visibility are impossible. Requirements provide the foundation for your entire project and are necessary to create realistic estimates and project plan. Without requirements, projects are much more likely to be delivered delivered late, over budget, and/or without the desired feature set. Maxsam Partners provides numerous software requirements consulting services including:

• Requirements Workshop - Maxsam Partners experts will help you define the critical requirements for you next project.
• Requirements Reviews - Independent analysis of your requirements can identify inconsistencies, conflicting requirements, and other requirements defects. An early requirement of your requirements can remove defects that would cost 50 to 200 times more to correct if they are left in the requirements document.
• Requirements Process Development - We'll help you build a requirements process that delivers solid business and technical requirements.
• UML Coaching - From use cases to sequence diagrams to state charts, we can help your project team effectively deploy UML techniques on its next project.

Requirements Workshop
For each requirement that is incorrectly specified, companies can pay 50 to 200 times as much to correct it later in the project. Maxsam Partners practical experts can help to ensure that customer needs are gathered and translated up front into an accurate specification of what the system must do. By doing this, we maximize each client's chance of meeting schedule, cost, and product objectives. Requirements work is not as simple as writing down what key users want the software to do. We know that the most difficult part of requirements gathering is not the act of recording what the users want. Rather, it is the exploratory, developmental activity of helping users figure out what they want. We know how to help you determine what is really needed. One of the ways we commonly help our customers is by facilitating a Requirements Workshop. By having Maxsam Partners facilitate your requirements workshop, you avoid risks associated with:

• Incomplete or inadequate definition of project needs and scope, which make project planning and management difficult
• Overlooking certain user classes which leads to dissatisfied customers
• Requirements creep which contributes to schedule and cost overruns
• Ambiguous requirements that lead to misinterpretations and cause defects and later rework
• This workshop is a facilitated working session that involves key project stakeholders and is designed to achieve consensus on the project's critical requirements. Getting the critical requirements settled early and quickly puts your project on the road to success.
• Maxsam Partners also works with companies to review existing requirements, implement new requirements practices, and coach business analysts in the use of requirements best practices.

Requirements Reviews
Improving the quality of the requirements helps your project succeed. Maxsam Partners experts will review an existing requirements document. We provide feedback on how the requirements can be improved to make them more clear, concise, unambiguous, and complete. Common issues identified in a Requirements Review include:

• Insufficient detail in the current requirements to manage the project to a successful conclusion
• Vague requirements which make it difficult to create a realistic project estimate
• Critical requirements that are not captured in the current requirements
• Incomplete requirements making the creation of test cases and designs difficult

Requirements Process Development
Incomplete, inadequate, or ambiguous requirements are the single largest source of project failure. Solid requirements are the most critical aspect to delivering projects that meet or exceed user expectations. Maxsam Partners requirements process development workshop enables your organization to create a requirements process that delivers solid business and technical requirements. Our workshops are based on a structured process that is tuned based to focus on your specific process goals. Process workshops typically result in the following deliverables:

• Process Framework. The process framework describes the activities and tools needed for your projects to develop and refine the relevant artifacts throughout the project. This includes details about deliverables produced, techniques used, when hand offs occur and how, when and how people participate, and the necessary supporting materials.
• Deployment Plan. A deployment plan outlines how and when the new process will be deployed into the organization.
• Maxsam Partners practical experts can also help make certain that customer needs are gathered and translated up front in our requirements workshop. We can help teams select the requirements techniques and practices they wish to use on a project and help them effectively use those techniques throughout the project.