Summary of the Parts that Make BambooRM™ Whole

Two weeks in and things are pretty busy!

As you can imagine it's been pretty busy over here in the Online Applications group with the recent release of our first product BambooRM.  Things are moving along nicely and we are getting some great feedback. So far we have evaluations of BambooRM happening in over 19 countries, and that's just in our first two weeks. Keep it up and please feel free to email us with any questions you might have. If you also want to discuss any issues or enhancement requests you can also hit us up via the BambooRM message board.

Speaking of discussions....

I have decided that for the next couple of weeks I'm going to sort of "demo" each feature of BambooRM. This is all going to be done with a mock-up IT project I created. The first "part" of BambooRM I'm going to discuss is the Discussion Board.

I'm sure you're thinking, "what...why?" Well, unlike our "Sample IT Project", which is created as an example site by default within BambooRM, a requirements management project doesn't come pre-populated with all your business and functional requirements or use-cases ready to go.  The first phase to a successful project is good communication amongst all team members. You really need to discuss your project in detail and determine what it is you are actually being asked to develop, build or facilitate, which is basically the essence of requirements management. For geographically dispersed teams, this is often taken care of via emails. While this method can in fact work, is it the most efficient way to deal with your project's needs? Let's look at some of the key issues with running a requirements management project via email. Ensuring that the appropriate project manager, team member, or actor is included in an email, including replies, tracking emails both sent and received and let's not forget the biggest issue of all, document versioning. (Just so you know, I will be blogging, at a later date, about BambooRM's built in versioning capability)

Looking at a sample discussion...

We are all familiar with how a discussion board works, right? Here we have a sample discussion I created built around a request from "HQ" asking their IT Dept. to deploy an internal portal solution. I'll give you one guess which product they go with...

If you notice, one of the benefits of using the discussion board is every entry into the discussion is both time-stamped as well as recorded as to who made the entry.  I like this feature because it gives you added traceability. Instead of spending time looking through emails, you have a quick reference point to refer to when questions get asked about project direction or when questions arise about changing original requirements. We have all heard, "Who requested that, when did that change?" If you used the discussion board to talk about changes, you can easily answer that question.

In the sample discussion, our team members are hashing out the project and what is required:

 It's through this discussion that they have determined what, in fact, their business requirements are:

Using the discussion board in BambooRM this team has been able to collaborate in one central location without sending email after email. It is through this discussion that they determined which product would work and why; they also determined that there are three requirements to deploy this solution, and based on that; they have determined that there needs to be three functional groups based off those business requirements.

Please don't focus on the actual content of this particular discussion as these are pretty simplistic examples. In a real project the discussions would or should include much greater detail. This is simply a basic example of how you can use the discussion board in BambooRM to ensure a successful project.  BambooRM can help your team access current data and communicate changes, questions and issues in an efficient way. With the additional alerting feature in BambooRM, if a requirement changes they will be informed as soon as that happens and they then have the ability to look into why via the discussion board which, by the way, also includes alerting.

Am I saying the discussion board is a major component for requirements management? No. However, I do think it's but one of many tools in BambooRM that, if used correctly, can certainly help your team avoid poor requirements; which, in fact, is the primary cause of most project failures.

Let us know what you think, email us or hit us up here on Bamboo Nation.