Hosted by Chandra Wobschall and Paul Houtkooper

Hey, JD Edwards community! It’s Chandra and Paul here, and we’re excited to bring you another deep dive into the world of requirements gathering with Episode 37 of The JDE Connection. If you’ve been following along, you know we’ve been digging into the challenges and intricacies of requirements gathering—this week, we’re wrapping up the series with a no-holds-barred look at some of the toughest issues we face in the process.

Handling Information Overload

In this episode, we tackle one of the biggest hurdles we encounter: stakeholders who bring everything to the table without a clear focus. We’ve all been there—the “I’m not quite sure what I want, but here’s everything just in case” approach. As we unpacked this, we shared how these information dumps can lead to confusion, misaligned expectations, and the dreaded “I didn’t know I wanted it until I saw it.” Sound familiar?

We also discussed how requirements can sometimes become so expansive and detailed that you’re essentially setting yourself up for failure if you try to cover every base. That’s why a little thing we call “J.E.R.M.”—Just Enough Requirements Management—really resonated with us. It’s all about finding the balance, managing scope, and prioritizing so that we keep projects on track without getting buried in details that could derail the timeline and objectives.

Juggling Competing Priorities

Another key point we dug into was managing competing priorities and different stakeholder visions. Picture this: a project with five stakeholders, each with a unique perspective, and only one project team trying to satisfy them all. We’ve all faced situations where we have to decide whether to satisfy the 80% or the more vocal 20%. We’re big fans of iterative approaches here because they allow us to fail fast and adjust quickly, giving stakeholders a sense of where the project is going before it’s fully formed.

Oh, and did we mention the importance of having a clear project champion? It’s amazing how a lack of dedicated advocacy can cause even the best projects to lose traction. Without someone in your corner, competing projects can overshadow efforts, making it that much harder to succeed.

That’s a Wrap

Towards the end, we circled back to the value of humility in requirements gathering. We know that as experts, there’s pressure to have all the answers, but sometimes the best solutions come from admitting when you don’t know and opening the floor for ideas. We had some good laughs, too, remembering times when we had to lean on each other or our teams to get through challenging requirements.

To conclude this final episode of our series, we shared a phrase likely familiar to many, certainly to most Minnesota Vikings fans and Green Bay Packers owners, that is used to express anger, exasperation, annoyance, or impatience.

We hope you enjoyed this 3-part series, and they inspire you to think about your own challenges in requirements gathering and maybe even tackle them from a new angle. Don’t miss our future episodes and remember, we want to hear from you! So, please send us your questions, feedback, or ideas for future episodes to us at [email protected].

Until next time, let’s keep learning, sharing, and most importantly, laughing together!

Toodles,

Missed an episode? Check out the full episode list!

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