Too many requirements, requirements, requirements?

Can you have too many requirements in a project? First of all, it depends on the type of project you are running.

Secondly if you have a complex business model, selling products & services direct to customers but also indirect sales, and you have both individuals and organizations as customers, in different geographic area on earth, don’t expect few requirements.

If you use an architecture mindset to manage a large set of requirements, the task is not overwhelming, even if some requirements are very much into detail. Have you ever been involved in tax regulations in multinational companies, you know what I’m talking about.

My way of structuring all requirement is to use the concept of business use-cases as a starting point. I group them into standard business capabilities or standard processes depending on what’s available in the sector, using either TM Forum or APQC.

Next, I use the detailed requirements to define variants of the business use-case to identify the complexity from the business model, e.g. differences for individuals and organizations, different tax rules in US and EU etc.

Finally identify duplicates of the requirements get when you collect the from different sources.

If you have extra time and tools, you can align the other artifacts, as information components, actors etc, in your architecture to the requirements.

Rinse and repeat for next area.