Requirement Inception

• Start the process
  • Identification of business need
  • New market opportunity
  • Great idea
• Involves
  • Building a business case
  • Preliminary feasibility assessment
  • Preliminary definition of project scope
  • Preliminary risk assessment

Vision Statement for Products]

Vision Statement template for Products (according to Moore)

• For [target customer]
• Who [statement of the need or opportunity]
• The [product name]
• Is [a product category]
• That [key benefit, compelling reason to buy or use]
• Unlike [primary competitive alternative, current system, or current business process],
• Our product [statement of primary differentiation and advantages of new product]

Creativity: Brainstorming and Design Thinking

Systematic process:Creativity is hard work. A systematic process generates more and better ideas

- Brainstorming and Design Thinking are examples of such processes

• Roles:Processes identify some roles to be played by participants (e.g., moderator). Synergy comes from having varied people participate including, hopefully, good idea generators!
• Creative atmosphere:The whole group must be open to new ideas, even those that might at first sound useless. Emphasize games and improvisations over premature rationality and judging!
• Inverting the question:If you want to develop an unbreakable product, ask how you can best break it. While users find it difficult to say what they want, they can talk for hours about what they do not want. They can tell you all the ugly things that happened in the past, which they do not want to experience again. Voilà, there are your requirements!

Process

To invent new way of doing things or when much is unknown

• Early on in a project particularly when:
  • Terrain is uncertain
  • There is little expertise for the type of applications
  • Innovation is important (e.g., when there is muchcompetition)
• Two main activities:
  • The Storm: Generating as many ideas as possible (quantity, not quality), to see something we always wanted without ever knowing it!
    • Divergent thinking
  • The Calm: Filtering out of ideas (combine, clarify, prioritize, improve...) to keep the best one(s) – may require some voting strategy
    • Convergent thinking

The Storm

Goal: generate as many ideas as possible

• All about quantity, not quality
• Look to combine or vary ideas already suggested
• No criticism or debate is permitted – we do not want to inhibit participants
• No rambling (long stories) or distractions. Be quick!
• Participants understand that nothing they say will be held against them later on (“what happens in Vegas...”)
• Scribe writes down all ideas where everyone can see
• E.g., whiteboard, paper taped to wall. Ideas do not leave the room...
• Wild is good!
  • Feel free to be gloriously wrong
  • Participants should NOT censor themselves or take too long to consider whether an idea is practical or not – let yourself go!