Major telecommunications manufacturer improves product quality and reduces cost overruns by transforming their Requirements Management processes with Project Assistants’ comprehensive training program.
Project Assistants’ Case Studies
Situation Situation
Lack of accountability between the IT department and business stakeholder led to ambiguities in the business requirements. The resulting late discovery of real business needs led to challenges in each of the proceeding stages of the project:

  • Design: Nebulous requirements about what was needed led to incomplete or incorrect design details.
  • Development: Project developers were frequently left to make their own interpretations of the business needs, which too often led to redevelopment work during the programming phase.
  • Testing: The end-users were uncovering missing business functions through testing, at a time when it’s expensive to make changes.
  • Post-Implementation: Several clients were coming back with residual issues during post-implementation review.
Solution Solution
Project Assistants leveraged our Requirements Management course and tailored it to Avaya’s existing SDLC methodology to meet their specific needs. Our training linked the generic methods to the specific Processes and Technologies of the organization, including business requirements templates, system requirements templates, and requirements traceability matrices. We reinforced these concepts through an interactive training style, and through hands-on case studies using real-world examples.
Benefits Benefits
Over the course of our engagement, Avaya achieved a one-level jump on the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Project Management Maturity models. Pre-training baseline evaluations were administered to all participants, and those same evaluations were compared to the post-training results, indicating a knowledge retention and improvement >25%, far out-stripping industry standards. The client reduced their cost and schedule overruns due to rework, which lowered overall costs and improved schedule performance. The satisfaction and overall relationship was markedly improved between the IT department and the stakeholders. The IT department and executives developed a relationship of appropriate accountability and clear communication and ultimately provided solutions that provided the intended benefits.