Vendors see it all the time – detailed requirements gathering that’s a complete waste of time for Not for Profits.
It comes via a request for information related to their system – oftentimes as a spreadsheet of requirements that contain hundreds of line items.
If the Not for Profit hired a consultant or contractor to gather these requirements, they probably spent thousands of dollars (sometimes six figures). If they managed to find a list off a Google search or from a previous selection project, it’s probably generic and incomplete.
And while it’s important to understand the high-level requirements for a new system at this stage, detailed requirements gathering is often a waste of time.
Why? I’ll give you a few reasons.
Reasons why detailed requirements gathering is a waste of time:
- You can’t afford to customise – Not for Profits can rarely afford to customise systems. So, you are better off finding a system that meets your high-level requirements and adopting the system’s processes and workflows instead.
- You’ll pay for the requirements gathering twice – During the Design or Discovery Phase prior to the implementation, the vendor will create a detailed requirements document that maps against their system’s native features.
- You’ll often copy bad processes – Documenting how you do things now is not necessarily best practice. Too many organisations have discovered that after paying for custom requirements.
- Your processes will change faster than the doc – I’ve seen it too many times where an organisation pays a consultant to document all their detailed processes so they can hand them to the vendor to duplicate. Within a few months, some processes have already changed.
So, what’s a better way for requirements gathering?
Personally, I often start with the pain points, “Why is the current system(s) not meeting the organisation’s requirements?”
That gives me a good view of their high-level needs and even the root cause of the issues right away, such as:
- Are the pain points because of a vendor capability (or even sustainability) issue?
- Has the organisation’s strategy changed a lot since they implemented the old system?
With this information documented at a high level, it’s much easier to try to research alternative vendors to ensure they can meet the requirements that are currently causing most of the pain.
But what if it’s not a system issue?
Sometimes, it has nothing to do with the system. Instead, the major pain points could be because of a lack of training or the need to build integrations between their systems.
In these situations, they may not need to buy a new system but just address these underlying issues.
Final thoughts for requirements gathering
So, before you waste a lot of time gathering detailed requirements, it may be worth checking out your organisation’s pain points first.
If you need a new system, it will be easier to short-list vendors that can meet those requirements as a minimum. But then again, maybe it’s not a system issue at all.
I often help Not for Profits with the selection of IT vendors. Let me know if you need some help.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Association President, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT decisions, especially around investments.
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