Product Lifecycle Management: Expediting Product Innovation
R. Nagarajan - October 20, 2006

Increasing the Visibility of Requirements

For a design team, a loosely stated requirement is often misleading. That's why it is important to capture requirements in a structured manner, in a requirements database maintained by requirements managers, before they are passed along to the product development teams. The role of requirements manager may not exist in the current scenario, or it may have been fulfilled by the marketing team. But it is essential to analyze requirements properly before taking them up for development. Companies can use best practice methodologies like Affinity Diagram, PUGH Matrix, or QFD for analyzing, prioritizing, and mapping requirements to existing features or to new features that they can deliver. These methodologies also require companies to benchmark what competitors can deliver to satisfy a given requirement. The true product lifecycle management (PLM) system emphasizes the fact that product requirements should be communicated clearly to all stakeholders of product development, including the design, testing, materials, supplier, manufacturing, production engineering, and service teams. Increasing the visibility of product requirements is the first step in implementing any PLM system...