Managing Preliminary Requirements Information in Information Technology Projects

Abstract

Information technology (IT) development often suffers from requirements uncertainty as in many cases only preliminary information is available. Wrong decisions may lead to rework that wastes resources and delays the project. Coping with preliminary information is thus an important aspect of project management. The authors apply a case study approach to analyze how IT professionals react to preliminary information and why they do so. The authors base their study on a concurrent engineering research study that provides guidelines how the downstream process (implementation) should react if the upstream process (analysis) is not able to provide all information. According to the authors' results, IT professionals predominantly apply these proposed reactions. Nevertheless, it is often unclear why they react the chosen way. They recommend IT professionals to invest effort to more systematically consider multiple reactions. Future research should focus on how the upstream process should react when the downstream process needs to make a decision.