Managing requirements in ICT companies

Purpose – Requirements management has become a challenge for new product development (NPD) as products are getting increasingly complicated and customer segments more fragmented. The purpose of this paper is to provide new ideas for improving requirements management in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector.Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative interview study is carried out in the ICT sector to clarify the current challenges in requirements management. The results of the interview study are analysed using a benchmark from the automotive industry. This benchmark is chosen, as the automotive industry is a developed business sector that has streamlined its business processes, including its requirements management.Findings – The paper shows how ICT can benefit from the experience of the car industry on issues such as managing customer needs throughout the NPD process, overflow of data and communicating requirements with suppliers.Research limitations/implications – Using another sec...

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