Career Watch: Advice on education and career paths

What Its All About
By Charlie Duczakowski
How early can an IT project start to fail? Very early. In fact, poor requirements definitions cause about 70% of IT project failures.

So, a good requirements- gatherer will be associated with a lot of project successes. That can only enhance your career.

To improve your requirements skills, you have to understand the difference between the what and the how. The what is the thing that the client is trying to accomplish. The how is the design used to get there. Quite often, the problem is that the requirements gatherer stops listening to the what and locks in on the how that hes already comfortable with.

Of course, clients dont always speak in what language. They often express what they want in how terms  asking for something theyve just seen in an advertisement, for instance, or requesting another column on a report. Its up to the gatherer, then, to pry under the surface to find out what data view theyre really after.

Imagine someone who needs to get over a body of water and brings this problem to a bridge designer. The bridge designers solution is to design a bridge, right? Other options  tunnels, submarines, balloons or dirigibles  exist, but not in the mind of a bridge designer. But the clients best interests are served by an unbiased third party who knows how to unlock the clients real needs and expectations. The goal is to figure out what the client needs from the system, not how he wants it to be built. Leave the how to the designers, and consider your job to be getting to the what.

Duczakowski is a senior consultant at Ouellette & Associates Consulting Inc. in Bedford, N.H. He is also a co-author of the book The IT Professional of the Future, due out this fall.