The iPhone as the Modern Day Mustang
My first car was a 68 Mustang. The car was almost twenty years old when I bought it. It had black interior and although it was an automatic, it had a 289 V8 and would really go. I was just out of school, had just gotten my first apartment and I was King. While my buddies were buying new cars, getting company cars or living in big cities and using transit, my car was more than transportation. It was the epitome of cool, even with two decades behind it. I can remember the snarl it made when you...
Read MoreBusiness Requirements vs. User Requirements
High level business requirements are usually pretty simple in a small project. Minor enhancements or changes to an existing product or service would fall into this category. Examples would be a wording change change in client correspondence or changing a commission calculation formula for a sales force contract. These business requirements often get documented in a project charter and in the business requirements with the same level of detail because from the perspective of the business sponsor...
Read MoreSo many requirements, so little understanding
Business requirements, high level requirements, user requirements, functional requirements, user interface requirements, detailed requirements, system requirements, non-functional requirements, interface requirements, software requirements, business process requirements. The good news to be taken from the list above is that there is no shortage of ways to think about requirements. The bad news is that a list of this size implies many different definitions of requirements which must be at...
Read MoreRequirements – I Got Nuthin!
After 20+ years in the IT business working on projects, I’ve decided I really don’t understand nearly enough about requirements and am going to make the harsh judgement that most IT staff who are either creators or consumers of requirements, as well as business people from whom requirements are supposed to originate, don’t know much about them either. So…I’m takin’ to readin’ to see if I can learn some of the discipline around requirements in a very orderly way. One of the more...
Read MoreOpportunity Everywhere in IT
Canada isn’t producing enough computer science graduates. So says most of the popular press and IT media I’ve been reading lately. Enrollments in post-secondary computing programs, at both college and university levels are down, both in Canada and the United States. The exception appears to be the University of Waterloo – good for it! I don’t want to debate why this is the case but from my perspective, within my client base, there is a ton of opportunity for solid IT...
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