Success factors (continued)

The innovation project just started. The project approach agreed and the kick-off held. Everybody understands the objectives. At this moment the launch date to bring the innovation on time to the market is a well known succesfactor. But there are more succesfactors related to time. Can the team deliver the desired results base d on the desribed high level requirements? Whats the impact of the business requirements?
Often these requirements are handed over to a specialist like business analist. Who in turn will often talk with process design and functional team members. These will hand over to the technical teammembers and the testteam (if they are already available). How to keep these handovers smooth and the interpretations correct. Do we really understand?
A different approach is to have each deliverable especially the business requirements shared with the whole team. This builds time to understand and time to respond. It helps at the requirements phase to specify the what more clearly (instead of the to early how). The (im)possible hows can be rephrased into what's. directions on how (technolgy enablement) can be shared. Add the questions 'what and how do you whant to test this requirement' in the early stage help to set the acceptance and test criteria. This takes away misunderstanding and overstated requirements. In most projects extra nice to haves type of requirements are put in to get more because common practice is the client always get less. Let give the client what he really needs. Let's make sure we all really understand reducing the misunderstanding and redo's. Thus getting clearer business requirements. An additional benefit of taking time to really understand is less change requests during and at the end of the project.
The early involvement of client and customers to specify the way they want to test the requirements shows their support and helps the time to accept the solution and time to understand at the earliest stage (in stead of a time in the future).
The better understanding created better collaborative working among the teams, better estimated which improve lead time and thus time to markt.
Taking this approach the projectteam was able to deliver the client and customer what they really need as a working solution on time.