Have you ever been dissatisfied with the deliverable of an IT Software Development Company? Did you ever feel like the product you were looking forward to isn’t meeting all your business needs?
Every new activity, product or project is created in response to a business need. Yet we often find ourselves in situations where, despite spending tremendous money, there’s a conflict between what has been created and what is actually needed by the business owners.
What could be the possible reason for such conflict?
The answer is poorly defined business needs.
First, let’s discuss business needs.
What are business needs?
Business needs are an important component of any IT project. Known at the beginning of any project, business needs describe all activities and characteristics of a project’s end product essential to meeting business goals.
The process of gathering business needs depends on the knowledge, and expertise of business analysts who facilitate to make sure that a project’s overall mission and components align with business goals.
What will that mean for the team on the development side? How is their work affected once they’re building a product without properly determining business needs?
• They have an unclear vision for end product.
• They won’t be able to leverage the right skills for the desired tasks.
• Poor communication about the business goals end up making a software product that is not at all aligned with the business objectives.
• The lack of knowledge about the problem their code is aiming to solve, can result in a nonproductive environment.
• The code starts to produce bugs overall doesn’t work towards meeting the end business need and this makes perfect sense as developers don’t have a vision over the goal of the entire project.
Why is it important to define the business needs to a Software Development Company?
Following are some of the key impacts of defining Business Needs in a Software Project:
Vision of the ultimate goal
Successful software development requires an understanding of clearly defined business needs. Once you combine the objectives of both your business and therefore the development team, you finish up creating an ideal environment for developing the software and your product.
Therefore, business needs must be addressed in a software project as they provide a vision of the ultimate goal. With the goal in view, developers can set priorities. they can also apply their expertise to supply better solutions to succeed in these goals. There’s a reason why business analysis is included within the development process in most companies.
It helps in creating a more comprehensive business case in the quest to justify their project. This is an important task that occurs early in the project and helps to set the stage for agreed upon work (and what the team should not be working on).
Without clear business requirements, poor decisions will be made. Decisions that may hamper development, disrupt deadlines, and lead to extra development stages.
Any experienced software development firm will always give importance to documenting the requirements of every project.
Listed below are a number of the advantages of defining business needs during a Software Project:
Ideal Development and Effective Implementation Plan
By knowing what the business owner wants, software developers can come up with the ideal development and implementation plan. Understanding the business requirements lowers the risk level and allows clients to enjoy better satisfaction levels by receiving efficient products in the first attempt. Defining business needs in a document ensures a successful software development project.
Business Intended Project
One of the finest ways to increase the chances of a successful software project is to make sure you’re designing and developing keeping in mind the nature of business. This is why it’s crucial to understand the needs of the business throughout the process. When you create a value-driven development process, you can identify what solutions your product brings to your business. For example, you can write out the desired results at the beginning of your project that answers your business needs and resolves the problems of the intended users.
Client Satisfaction and Loyalty
Each business owner considers the project from his or her individual perspective. To build a complete picture of what the project should achieve, a software development company must understand these different perspectives and gather the different requirements. This will not only help you to attain the satisfaction but also the loyalty for future projects. Through dedicated relations, companies can ensure businesses do not forget their initial positive experience.
Eliminates Miscommunication
Undocumented business needs in a software project lead to miscommunication on all sides. It’s not at all rare that a business owner and a developer understand the same terms differently. Especially when we’re talking about an outsourcing software development company that’s not entirely acquainted with the business needs.
Miscommunication, in turn, lays a straight path to constant rework, changes, and bug fixes. Usually, this chain ends with disrupted deadlines and costs that go through the roof.
To ensure smooth software project development, all parts of the product and the process of its development must be understood by every team member in the same way. To ensure that developers see each feature of the product exactly as the business does, it is crucial to define the business needs. This will help the development team to measure the product against their goals and maximize the value flow.
Bring Consistency
When business needs are not clearly defined, stakeholders might not be familiar with the basic scope of the project, and end-users may be tempted to describe all sorts of functionality that your project was never designed to provide. This affects the consistency of project development which can be a tedious, time consuming process resulting in demotivated and frustrated developers.
To help you avoid problems like these, a focused and detailed business requirements analysis is necessary. This is the process of discovering, analyzing, defining, and documenting the business requirements that are related to a specific software project and it’s the process by which you clearly and precisely define the scope, so that the software development company accurately assess the timeline and resources needed to complete it.
Remember: To achieve your business needs, you must accurately define them and a good software development firm would always make it their first priority.
Avoid Misunderstanding
To avoid misunderstanding, the business needs helps you break them down into detailed, specific requirements that everyone agrees on. What’s more, it’s usually much quicker and cheaper to fix a problem or misunderstanding at the analysis stage than it is when the “finished product” is delivered.
Final Thoughts
Not only should the business need to be understood, re-visited and re-validated iteratively, it should be communicated to all involved team members to remind and motivate them of the value of their work. It is critically important to accurately capture the business needs. The validity and utility of all current actions depend on it. Ultimately saving your company from, loss of motivation, frustration, waste of time and unhappy clients.