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SMART Requirements - Attainable

August 17, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices, Requirements Management

SMART Requirements - Attainable (#4 in the series SMART Requirements)
By Jessica Popp

Attainable: Also referred to as achievable, actionable, or appropriate. All are fine attributes and are intended to ensure that the requirement is physically able to be achieved given existing circumstances. There is arguably overlap between attainable and realistic. I generally reserve attainable to check the likelihood that I will be able to achieve the requirement including whether the requirement is too grandiose (which is the overlap with the term realistic).

  • Weak Requirement: The monthly marketing sales report and the monthly financial statements shall both be delivered on the 1st business day of the month.

    Why is this weak? This may not be obvious initially and may be realized only after analysis is done. In this case it becomes un-attainable when the project manager learns that the sales report takes 28 hours to run, so it becomes physically impossible to deliver these reports both on the same day with the current systems that are available.

  • Strong Requirement: The monthly marketing sales report will be delivered on the 1st business day of the month. The monthly financial statements will be delivered on the 3rd business day of the month.

    Note: The resulting strong requirement was broken into two requirements. As mentioned before, avoid using and as it can create ambiguity. Here it would arguably have been ok, but just avoid it as good practice.

  • Weak Requirement: The resulting web site shall be so popular that it gets 1,000,000 hits within the first week.

    Why is this weak? This falls under the grandiose category (or in some minds, realistic) and is possibly more of a wish of the customer. Just because both parties know it’s not achievable does not make it ok to write it down. Work with the customer to re-write something quantitative that still captures the essence of their goal.

  • Strong Requirement: The resulting web site, when reviewed by XYZ site-rating agency, will receive at least a 3 out 5 five rating in the category of “Fun websites to visit.”

Jessica Popp is a practicing project manager in software engineering. She has more than 13 years experience in software development, project management and people leadership in both Fortune 500 and startup companies. She has a wealth of hands-on project experience from the smallest project to projects whose budgets exceeded $50M per year. Jessica holds a BBS in Information Systems, an MS in Decision Sciences and has a current PMP certification. Jessica runs Project Management 101, a blog dedicated to disccussing various topics about Project Management.

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