 Hey, how are you? I'm Darryl O'Donnell from technology knobs here to talk to you about a business problem. I keep seeing People end up in well massive distress massive fights massive arguments or just frustrating discussions about this concept of Requirements requirements are critical to many people many players on a contract Contracts officer project managers analysts want to understand the deep requirements, and they are important Don't get me wrong What's wrong is requirements become front and center the thing that will manage a project with And that's one of the reasons why I advocate and tell all my clients to go to an agile method which doesn't use requirements At least not as a front-facing in-your-face kind of thing because here's a problem with requirements requirements are basically these Things he's weird things that everybody on the analyst the project manager side And other players want to have this sort of a black-and-white checkbox that says Yes That requirement was met the difficulty comes in breaking down a massive amount of information Which in the operational space has a lot going on there are far too many moving pieces to do just Requirements requirements again are important when you're dealing with a public safety broadband network radio And you want to make sure the things are connected requirements are very important When it comes down to using an application to share information from the field back to an operation Center Requirements are there they're in the background But really it's the operational story that matters and stories is actually one of the agile concept because stories are incredibly powerful Neuroscience has taught us that basically as we listen to a story as we listen to it our head We actually go into the story story can be about something I don't even understand But my brain will actually put itself into that position and it becomes part of it It's also how we learn we've been a storytelling culture in operations many stories are used There's lessons learned there's after-action reviews There are stories during training during exercising stories are how we communicate a wealth of information So stories are actually one of the concepts are to use an agile technology Which actually plays throughout the rest of this issue of technology in office magazine if you're watching it in the application itself If you're on YouTube go get the application. There's a link down below So stories are how we talk to each other When operators talk to each other about what happened or what they would like to see what what would they like to change? They tell stories From that though a good analyst can take and derive They generate requirements from the stories they can validate requirements from the stories the problem occurs when requirements become front and center You don't deal with requirements. They don't mean anything When the senior leaders are involved What are they doing? They want to know you know policy wise. What's this project going to do for me? What do I need to do for it? When it comes to policy especially You look at the where are we today? Where are we going to be tomorrow the real near future and then that sort of to be state that future state down the road in which case There's probably a story that says There are going to be policy barriers. They're already there or they're coming and Sir ma'am we need you to stand up Fight for the project and get in front of that train and make sure it doesn't hit us because That story is so critical that they get out and block things before policy comes into place or governance needs to be changed They go and make that change you do that through stories You explain to them what it will happen if it doesn't happen and then how the future could be Given the trajectory the story of the project. We're working on the operators again are telling stories Where it gets really interesting is when you look at the technical team. I've done a horrible diagram here But let's take the technical team Who typically are the ones who want and hate? Requirements because inevitably No matter how good you think your requirements are when you go to bid when you go to do a project Whether it's an internal one that you're launching or whether it's a formal contracting thing Generally speaking, I'll use the technical term your requirements suck. Yeah, that's the term they suck The reality is the people doing requirements don't know the operators well enough They don't know the senior leaders operate well enough. They list they read through training manuals They may sit and talk if they're really a rare type of analyst building up the requirements and even then things change Things weren't documented well enough and inevitably we are going to discover new requirements as we tell the stories throughout the project So you may as well start here because this is where the magic happens your technical team Needs the requirements and they can derive them, but they must Derive them from stories. I put a two-way arrow here because the stories from the technical team Talking to the operators are just as important if not more important The operators need to be engaged if they read requirements, they're gone They're just out of there if you're an operator, you know what I'm talking about. It's just not of interest It's not relevant to you. Boom. You've moved on to something else in your head. You might be sitting there, but you're gone The technical team though must tell the story in operator speak Yes, there are technical pieces behind it They need to translate that tell a coherent story so that we all understand if you can get on the same page And we can all tell the same story your operators could then tell the tech team where things are wrong Tell them a little slightly adjusted story now. You missed this point You need to go do it this way and we don't do it that way. We can't do it that way. Here's why Those aren't requirements So I guess I've done an ugly diagram here But what I wanted to get across was really it's all about the stories It's not the requirements requirements are there and important, but if you're not telling stories You're going to be in trouble. Hopefully that helps. I'm Daryl O'Donnell from technology knobs. Talk to you later