Maveric Systems, a Chennai based software testing company recently released a report on requirements definition and management based on a study of tier-1 and tier-2 banks in the UK, Benelux, Nordics, Middle East & Africa, and Asia Pacific.

One of their major findings was that  35% of the IT budget is wasted due to rework caused by poor definition and management of business requirements from IT.  Interestingly, IAG, in its 2009 BA benchmark report found almost identical results in North America: that 33% of money spent on IT development is wasted.

In a press release for this study, Surya Vangara, Senior Vice President – Financial Services Business, Maveric Systems said, “Today, less than 10% of the total time is spent on gathering requirements. Instead, doubling this time to say 20% will save up to 35% of the budget that is wasted due to rework caused by poor definition and management of requirements.”

Some other key findings from this latest study:

  1. Only 50-60% of Business and IT Heads are satisfied with their organizations’ requirement management practices
  2. Due to poor requirements definition, development time goes up by 25% in transformation projects, and by 19-29% in BAU (Business-As-Usual) engagements
  3. 23% of the projects are either deferred or not implemented due to poor definition of requirements
  4. A 12% increase in the IT budget is needed to fix these defects originating in the requirements definition and add 10% to cost base
  5. These banks spend 5% of their overall IT budget on requirements assurance

We, will be publishing some new study results on the state of business analysis and RDM  in the North American marketplace in the upcoming months. It will be interesting to compare with this very thought-provoking study from Maveric and NelsonHall.

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