User involvement: key to success

The evidence is voluminous, consistent, and incontrovertible. It applies to corporate, government agency, and military software development. Quite simply, the software we build does not meet our customers´ needs: those of us who build large software programs fail miserably-90 percent of the time-to deliver what customers want, when they want it, at the agreed upon price; we fail to adequately manage the software development process, user-developer communication breaks down, the requirements control process breaks down, we have runaway requirements, budgets, schedules, and “death march” projects. The Best Practices Framework of the Software Program Manager´s Network outlines some solutions. First, we must identify what can go wrong. Precedents give ample hints regarding risks. We need to manage the development process with more attention, particularly to what might go wrong. Second, we must manage the most fundamental part of our task: defining our goal. We fail to use requirements management to surface (early) errors or problems, to baseline and track changes, and to improve user-developer communication