ReqMan is the right solution for a variety of user groups

Here, by way of an example, we have created different user profiles to familiarize you better with the challenges involved in requirements management and explain why ReqMan is the most effective way of meeting these challenges. The persons mentioned here are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

User roles in requirements management

Han C.
42 years old
Requirements Engineer
Automotive supplier

Role: Requirements Engineer

“Creating the compliance matrix in ReqMan greatly simplifies my tasks. In addition to being able to work together with the technical experts on a single platform, it’s also very easy for me to access requirements evaluated in earlier projects, which saves me time. Even if customers subsequently supply us with updated document versions, there’s no cause for alarm because ReqMan’s automatic comparison function displays all the changes in the text, graphics and tables, and these can then be transferred to the database easily. For us, ReqMan has become the single source of truth for requirements.”

Objectives

Create a compliance matrix
Provide feedback to customer consultants

Wishes/needs

I want to be able to create a compliance matrix quickly and easily “at the click of a button”.
I want to be able to re-use requirements that were already evaluated in earlier projects so that I don’t have to re-invent the wheel.
I want transparency with regard to past comments and evaluations for individual requirements and not just for the document as a whole.
I want to have an easy way of consulting with technical experts based on reliable information.
I want to be able to keep track of the current status of individual requirements or groups of requirements at all times.
I want to be able to pass on requirements to specific experts and then integrate the results automatically in the overall evaluation again.
I also always want to have a clear overview when changes are made to different versions of requirements.

Challenges without ReqMan

A lot of the time in the request phase is taken up with managing and distributing requirements, leaving less time available for technical evaluations.
The requirements specifications are normally provided in the form of PDF files that either I or our customer consultants can only break down into individual requirements specifications by copying and pasting, which involves an enormous amount of time and effort. And errors constantly find their way into the communicated requirements.
There is no central tool for managing the requirements from the specifications. Instead we have a large number of home-made solutions and workarounds involving countless Excel lists that were never properly synchronized.
Version management of evaluation statuses is performed exclusively on the basis of the file versions of the entire document. The number of versions therefore grows dramatically and an overview is no longer possible.
Comparisons between different versions of requirements specifications constantly demand a huge amount of time and effort because we have to look through the entire document again and again.
There is no centralized access to evaluations from earlier projects. We can only open documents individually and hope to find a relevant evaluation there.

Expectations towards ReqMan

With ReqMan, the up-to-the-minute status of the evaluation of a requirement is always mapped reliably.
With ReqMan, I can consult with the technical experts quickly and clearly – including over multiple iterations and across corporate boundaries.
ReqMan provides me with an easy-to-use tool that I can use to create the compliance matrix quickly at the click of a button.
ReqMan provides all the stakeholders involved in the process with a central platform for evaluating and harmonizing requirements.
If the customer sends us a new version of the requirements specification during the project, ReqMan processes it automatically with almost no extra effort.

Role: Project manager

“ReqMan allows me to see the overall progress of our projects at any time without first having to merge different project statuses or wait for manual evaluations from my staff.”

Objective

Bring the project to a successful conclusion on time and in budget while complying with the defined quality criteria.

Wishes/needs

I want to be informed at all times about the status of the project, the fulfillment of the customer’s requirements and also the internal requirements from different departments.
I want to have an overview over multiple projects and be able to pass on the project schedule transparently to everyone involved in the project.
I want to have a clear overview of the project milestones and dates for deliverables at all times so that I don’t miss any deadlines.

Challenges without ReqMan

My project teams, which are sometimes very large, work with decentralized systems (e.g. Excel) and have different project statuses, which makes it very difficult to get a transparent view of the overall progress of a project.
I have to search for the project-related documents that I need in order to evaluate the requirements in different storage systems in different locations or even in e-mails.
With so many requirements to evaluate, it’s not possible to maintain an overview and I can’t reliably determine whether it will be possible to run the overall project to schedule.
Many of the projects are conducted in task force mode in order to give us a chance of evaluating the requirements in the short time available and this leads to dissatisfaction among the employees.

Expectations towards ReqMan

ReqMan should help me benefit from up-to-date, reliable information about the fulfillment status of all the requirements in my project.
With ReqMan, I can bring together requirements from various sources, such as documents in the file system or SharePoint, requirements management tools (DOORS, Polarion, Integrity etc.) and use these as a basis for evaluating the overall project status.

Ludwig R.
54 years old
Project Manager
Medical

Jody W.
36 years old
Technical expert
Automotive supplier

Role: Technical expert

“In ReqMan, I can view the commenting history of every requirement and consequently follow my colleagues’ trains of thought. What is more, in ReqMan I have a personalized dashboard that shows me which requirements I have to deal with and how urgently.”

Objective

Evaluate the feasibility of fulfilling requirements.

Wishes/needs

I want a dashboard that tells me all the requirements that I still have to evaluate or have already evaluated.
I want to be informed of the current project scheduling so that I can plan my work.
I want an easy way to view comments and observations relating to individual requirements and also to see their histories.
I want to be able to access the observations/comments (who? what? when?) made by other stakeholders so that I can compare them with my own evaluation.

Challenges without ReqMan

I lose track of when I have to evaluate which requirements in which project.
It’s almost impossible to set priorities correctly since my own tasks are not transparently defined across all the projects.
I can’t access the knowledge that my company or my colleagues already possess because everyone saves their comments and the considerations on which they base their decisions in decentralized systems.
It’s not clear to me who has made which decisions regarding an evaluation and why. If decisions are made in another project, then I don’t know anything about them.

Expectations placed on ReqMan

With ReqMan, I can always see exactly what I still have to do and how long I have before I have to submit my technical evaluation of the requirements.
ReqMan also allows me to view similar requirements that have been handled by me or one of my colleagues across all the projects and see if I can use any of the evaluations.
ReqMan shows me immediately which colleagues I can talk to concerning which requirements and saves me valuable time tracking down the right person.
With ReqMan, I can view my colleagues’ comments on requirements in chronological order, which also lets me understand the reasoning behind decisions made.

Role: Customer consultant

“ReqMan is a great help to me in my everyday work. I can use the import function to read the requirements out of the documents individually and transfer them to our database in just a few seconds. Even PDF documents are no longer a problem. This means that my colleagues in the project can start evaluating the requirements right away and that customers receive feedback on their requirements much faster.”

Objective

Provide customers with precise information on the feasibility of fulfilling their requirements as quickly as possible so that we can then draw up an offer.

Wishes/needs

I want to receive feedback from the requirements engineer about how we can fulfill the customer’s requirements specification as quickly as possible.
I don’t want to have to work with a lot of different documents within the company but want to have a digital data source.
I don’t want to have to distribute requirements by copying and pasting but would like to be able to provide requirements to my colleagues in the company for further evaluation in an automated way.

Challenges without ReqMan

Every day, I receive a large number of documents from each customer containing requirements that I have to process individually.
Each document has a different structure and some of them are also in multiple languages. I have to break down all the information manually and then enter it in the downstream systems for requirements engineering.
I receive no information about what has changed when customers send me new versions of their documents. I have to find this out myself by laboriously checking the versions against one another, and I’m always worried about missing something important.

Expectations placed on ReqMan

ReqMan provides me with a trouble-free, highly automated way to pass on information from different document types to the requirements engineers in my company.
With ReqMan, I can give my customers faster and easier-to-follow feedback on the evaluation of their requests based on an examination performed by all the technical experts.
Thanks to ReqMan, I save time during the evaluation of requirements that I can use to discuss the contents of the requirements in greater detail with my customers and coordinate these better.