putting IT together

The Hidden Costs of Project Rework

Many organisations and projects struggle to get their requirements clear, complete and consistent. This leads to continual rework and wasted effort within the project.

Here are some typical project symptoms which indicate high levels of rework. Do you recognise any of these?

• Difficulty in finalising scope and "signing-off" requirements
• Continual discovery of "new" requirements
• High numbers of defects and change requests
• Large amounts of analyst time spent on maintaining documentation
• Re-keying of test scripts from requirements documents
• Late projects, squeezed test plans and incomplete testing

Many of these problems are caused by poor requirements quality, inflexible project structures and inefficient integration of project disciplines, often including lack of standards and poor use of tools. And this is a major problem. Indeed, according to a study by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), rework costs in analysis, development and testing can reach 40% of total project expenditure.

We can help you to improve requirements quality and reduce rework on your projects. Typically you could reduce project rework by 25%-50%, which for most projects would give you a project cost saving of over 10%.