Your house could end up like Sarah Winchester’s. A house built based on the advice of a psychic, not an architect. Built without plans, taking years yet never finished, costing much too much money, and full of unnecessary features: 160 rooms, 2 basements, and doors and stairways that lead nowhere.
You shouldn’t try to implement an eCommerce solution without detailed business requirements, either. You might end up with functionality you don’t need, with features you can’t manage and with critical functionality nowhere to be found. And you might end up paying way too much money for way too little value.
No matter what eCommerce project you’re undertaking, thorough requirements are the cornerstone of success. And we’re not talking about just a wish list of needed features and desired bells and whistles. You’ll need business, functional and technical requirements. Oh, you’re not done yet. You’ll also need best practices, competitive analysis and prioritization. Use cases. Workflows. This may seem like a great deal of work. But we guarantee that NOT doing all this will cause a good deal of trouble and expense down the road.
As many of us have experienced firsthand, requirements left unaddressed now will come back to haunt you – and at what cost? Will you have to go back and start from scratch? That is very expensive – in time, lost opportunity costs and hard dollars. Or will you do kludgey, quick-and-dirty patches that you will end up living with for far too long? That will cause every enhancement, every new point solution, every additional integration to be two or three times as costly and problematic.
Earlier today, we gave a webinar with Elastic Path. This one-hour session covered 10 Steps to Requirements Diligence, a way to ensure project success:
- Align with Business Objectives
- Know Relevant Best Practices
- Perform Competitive Analysis
- Define Functional Requirements in Detail
- Prioritize and Time Phase Requirements
- Document Use Cases
- Diagram Workflow Designs
- Apply Creative Design
- Test and Adjust Requirements Again and Again
- Keep Requirements Updated Always
Yes, there is a lot to think about and do. But planning is always time and effort well-spent and a good way to avoid mistakes. There’s a reason they say: Measure twice, cut once.
The webinar replay and the results of two surveys taken during the presentation are now available here .