Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Gathering Business Requirements

Gathering requirements is a critical part of any technology project. But it can be challenging to ensure you have all the information needed up front, especially when dealing with stakeholders who may not understand precisely what they need and why.

Unfortunately, this lack of clarity around requirements can lead to delays and missteps.

As an experienced Salesforce Admin, you know better than anyone how essential it is to avoid such mishaps when embarking on a new initiative: getting those initial requirements sorted out correctly can make all the difference in a project’s success or failure.

So if you’re about to launch into a new technology endeavor and want to know what pitfalls lie ahead, read on to learn some of the most common mistakes made when gathering requirements — and how you can sidestep them!

Not Understanding the Needs of the Stakeholders

Stakeholders are individuals or groups who have a vested interest in the project. It is essential to understand their needs to ensure that the final product meets their expectations.

Unfortunately, understanding stakeholder needs can be difficult and time-consuming. Investing the necessary effort upfront is essential to ensure that all stakeholders are heard and their requirements adequately documented. Failing to do so can result in a product that fails to meet everyone’s expectations.

Why it’s crucial to understand the needs of the stakeholders:

There are many benefits to understanding the needs of stakeholders when obtaining business requirements for a technology project. The stakeholders represent the people or organizations vested in the project’s outcome, so they must be aware of their desired results.

Knowing and addressing stakeholder needs ensures an inclusive dialogue for informed decision-making and helps to build shared ownership. Understanding what each stakeholder needs from the project also enables you to align expectations and encourages collaboration among parties involved in the process.

Answering difficult questions ahead of time can proactively decrease the risk of costly miscommunications later on. Taking time to consider the stakeholders’ input not only gives individuals a sense of being valued but is ultimately crucial to delivering a successful technology solution that meets both budget and timeline goals.

Not Identifying All of the Stakeholders

A related pitfall is not identifying all of the stakeholders. There may be some stakeholders who are not apparent at first glance. It is essential to take the time to identify all stakeholders and understand their needs before proceeding with the project.

Why it’s essential to identify all of the stakeholders:

Identifying all stakeholders of a technology project is an essential first step in ensuring the successful completion of the project. Without this preliminary step, the team tasked with developing the product may miss important feedback from key players involved in the overall workflow or business processes.

For instance, stakeholders might have helpful ideas or critical insights about how certain aspects of the technology could be incorporated into existing systems or processes. Gathering input from every stakeholder also helps to create consensus around what the project hopes to achieve and gain buy-in for the final product.

Creating awareness about different roles and responsibilities regarding a project helps keep everyone involved informed, and informed decision-making leads to improved results.

Not Gathering Requirements From All of the Stakeholders

Once all the stakeholders have been identified, it is vital to gather their requirements. Requirements gathering can be done through interviews, surveys, focus groups, or other methods. It is essential to get input from all stakeholders to ensure that all their needs are met.

Why it’s critical to gather requirements from all of the stakeholders:

Ensuring all stakeholders in a technology project have their business requirements gathered is critical for successfully implementing the project. This is because stakeholders have different perspectives, needs, and goals regarding their involvement with the technology project.

For example, one stakeholder’s primary responsibility may be customer relationships, while another stakeholder’s primary responsibility may be system capabilities.

Without gathering requirements from each of these separate stakeholders, it can present an incomplete picture of the goals and objectives for the project as a whole.

Therefore, capturing all business requirements from each stakeholder is essential to provide a comprehensive understanding of how the technology project will move forward.

Not Documenting the Requirements

Another common mistake is not documenting the requirements that have been gathered. Requirements should be documented clearly and concisely so they can be referenced later.

This will help to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that there is a clear understanding of what needs to be done.

Why documenting the business requirements is essential:

Documenting business requirements for any technology project is an essential step that should not be skipped. By taking the time to document the high-level goals of the project clearly, organizational stakeholders can easily understand what the objectives are.

Doing so also allows all formal and informal communication to be captured in one centralized location. Additionally, anyone associated with the project can refer to this shared document to better understand its purpose and desired outcome.

Properly documented business requirements provide flexibility and ensure that changes, if necessary, can be tracked over time from a written record.

As such, documenting business requirements for a technology project provides additional clarity on overall expectations and helps drive more successful projects.

Not Prioritizing the Requirements

Once all requirements have been gathered and documented, it is important to prioritize them. Not all requirements will be equally important, and some may need to be addressed before others. Prioritizing requirements will help to ensure that the most important ones are addressed first and that resources are used efficiently.

Why prioritizing the business requirements is vital:

Prioritizing the business requirements of a technology project is an absolute necessity for success. It ensures that the overall objectives and goals of the project are achieved while helping to keep the scope and timeline achievable.

Without properly prioritized requirements, the resulting product may not meet customer expectations or solve the problem it was intended to address.

Additionally, a lack of priority awareness can lead to feature creep throughout the project, which adds activities and timelines that increase development costs and/or reduce the overall quality of the result.

Therefore establishing a priority structure when defining business requirements is crucial in any successful technology project.

Trying to Please Everyone

One final pitfall to avoid is trying to please everyone with the project outcome. It is important to remember that it is impossible to please everyone and that some compromises may need to be made to complete the project within budget and on schedule.

Why is it problematic to try and please everyone:

Trying to please everyone when gathering business requirements for a technology project is an unrealistic goal and can be very problematic. Maintaining a broad scope of preferences can lead to unclear, disorganized project plans with specific details that may not have been considered initially.

It is also possible to include competing requirements that are not easily reconciled, leading to delays and undesired repercussions in the project’s development.

Furthermore, trying to meet everyone’s expectations may result in higher expenses as resources are put towards increasing the breadth of activities.

For these reasons, it is best to identify key stakeholders and prioritize their preferences into workable objectives aligned with the project’s budget and timeline.

Summary

By following these best practices, you can avoid many common pitfalls when gathering requirements for a Salesforce project. With a shared understanding of objectives and clear lines of communication, your team can work together to collect accurate data and create successful tech projects.

For more information on managing every step of a project from start to finish, enroll in my online course, Project Management Secrets.