Successful launch of product development hinges heavily on cautious planning, unambiguous characterization, and effectual communication. The said elements become more crucial if you want product development outside the precinct of your company or organization. In order to completely define your outsourced product development projects and accordingly map out your road to success, three primary rungs of analysis must be done with a well thought out process, comprising Product Requirements, Project requirements, and Design Requirements.

Product Requirements

It usually starts with customer or marketing requirements and flows through the system engineering and regulatory process to fully define how the product will look, feel, and perform once it is complete. However, this process is iterative as tradeoffs are made between features and benefits, and the inherent safety, regulatory, and implementation overhead incurred to implement these features, but the end product emerges out as a comprehensive product requirements specification.

Project Requirements

Project requirement is one more critically important process of the product development project analysis. At this stage of analysis, development plans are formulated, tools are selected, norms are established, and communication methods are defined-all these help development team members understand clearly their roles and responsibilities. Clarity at this stage lets the development team concentrate on technical challenges. Precisely, project requirement process sketches out a clear development plan that considers and documents interface points, tools,risks, and defines how information will flow, how system will be used, and how obstacles will be overcome.

Design Transfer Definition

The design transfer definition comes at the final step to ensure successful outsourced product development. At this stage, the structure and content of the design outputs as well as the process by which these outputs will be delivered, are identified and documented. The optimal end result from this process is a sender that fully understands the formats, templates, and best-practices expected by the receiver and a receiver that knows which outputs will be sent and in what format and timeframe to expect them.

Effective Requirements Definition: Key to Outsourcing Success

Requirements identification is the most critical element of a successful outsourced development project. Three primary groups of requirements are: product requirements, project requirements, and design transfer requirements.

Product requirements

Product requirements remain at the core of the product development project. One must know what they are creating in order to successfully realize it. This knowledge needs to be communicated to all members of the development team. This involves fully documenting, reviewing, and clarifying the product requirements. This should be a first step in the project plan.

Project requirements

Identification of Project requirements is the second major identification category necessary for outsourced product development success. These critical factors include required interface points, deliverables, tools, team members and roles, and other project planning items necessary to fully identify how the product will be completed.

Design transfer requirements

The last key requirements definition category is identification of the design transfer requirements. The design transfer requirements describe who needs which deliverables at the end of the project and, more specifically, the format and form that these deliverables must assume to seamlessly integrate into the destination systems. Whether it’s documentation control or a specific, chosen manufacturer, clear definition of how the recipient must receive the project outputs in order to quickly and efficiently finish the product development project pays huge dividends at the end of the successful product development effort.

Bottom Line

With careful, up-front analysis of the product, project, and design transfer requirements as a critical first step, your company will be on the road to outsourced product development success.