On June 24th, the IIBA Brussels chapter had the honor to host its very first webinar "What is a Requirements Management Office (RMO) and why do you need one?" with guest speaker Michel Raimondo. Did we catch your interest? You can watch the recorded webinar by clicking the following link and/or read our brief summary below.

Michel Raimondo shared with us his insights he gathered from his many years of experience as an operational consultant, covering business transformation, change management programs, IT governance and strategic planning, portfolio/program management, business process re-engineering and business architecture/analysis. In addition to his consulting roles in a variety of domains, he has held several leadership positions information systems departments, is a regular conference speaker and workshop facilitator.

Requirements are a critical component when developing and implementing solutions, and managing the related organizational changes. A quick survey among the participants showed that the majority (56% of the responses) believe that 55% of project failures was caused by missing or bad requirements. A more comprehensive survey by the Standish Group showed that 43.2% of project failures were due to bad or missing requirements.
Requirements elicitation & management is typically conducted following project management frameworks, methods and best practices. However, requirements lifecycles always outlast project lifecycles. They need to be maintained to assist ongoing business operations and to help adapt operations’ capabilities to remain relevant in a fast-evolving market conditions. Requirements are also often common between projects. 39% of the webinar participants believed that about 60% of requirements are common between assets of an organization. According to Michel Raimondo, up to 80% of requirements can be considered to be common between company assets.
For organizations to continue to deliver value to their customers, requirements are best managed independently from projects within the RMO: The Requirements Management Office.
Important for the success of the RMO is to master and understand the domain-specific requirements, requirements that are specific to a particular domain or area of business. Such kind of knowledge would also enable an organization to anticipate on requirements. The RMO exists to manage the single version of truth of a (common) requirement, potentially with the help of requirements management tracking software. An RMO enables organizations to better manage their value through an end-to-end vision on requirements lifecycle management. Last but not least, there is also a bright future out there for those currently occupying a role as a BA according to Michel Raimondo and the audience:

So let us embrace the idea and concept of the RMO, and continue to promote the added value we BA’s can deliver for our organizations and their projects. The continuous inclusion of the Business Analyst role in strategic roles, project roles or operational roles, orchestrated by the RMO will enable a long-term vision and strategy. A mix for success!