Requirements Management Tools-Enhancing Product Quality

The success mantra for every business lies in understanding the customer requirements. A requirement is a capability to which a product or service should conform to. However, in the globalized business world, understanding the needs of the large customer base is a difficult proposition as simple speculations will lead to wastage of time and investments. An effective requirement analysis will save the enterprise from such losses. Nevertheless, this would require them to make use of a platform that would facilitate capturing the requirements, managing them and collaborating for the development of products and services.

Wikipedia defines requirements management as “the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders”. Being a continuous process throughout a project requirements management plays a significant role in software development life cycle and more so in case of distributed software and systems development. For efficient and optimal management of requirements, enterprises need to invest in requirements management tools that can assist them in defining, documenting and allowing them to store requirements in a central location for easy access by the project teams as well as customers.

The proper use of requirements management tools works in tune with business strategies towards reduction in costs, minimized time to market, quality enhancements and maximum customer satisfaction. These tools developed by the leading service providers in application lifecycle management is an "anytime anywhere requirements" management, gathering and analysis application that helps the distantly located team members share project objectives and deliverables. With its rich implementation of requirements gathering, parsing, base lining, traceability and intelligent reporting in a process oriented methodology, the requirements management solution helps the project teams to efficiently map and manage requirements resulting in a top-quality application that matches the user requirements.

The industry leading requirements management tools are completely web-based with all functions including administrative and configuration processes being supported over the web. This enables effective telecommuting, better management and control of offshore projects and easy collaboration with both internal groups and service partners. Further with the most comprehensive traceability relation features the tools allows multiple types of relations including customized ones between requirements. This facilitates enterprises to create logical links either as 'depending’, ‘affecting’, or ‘bi-directional'.

Well managed and implemented requirements are of great value for the enterprise. By reusing the requirements, project teams can cut down on development time while enhancing the project quality. The requirements management tool from the leaders in the industry has several features which supports the requirements’ reuse. Further this also benefits enterprises to evaluate and prioritize requirements for releases, facilitates in better team collaboration and communication, and automatically manages regulatory compliance while effectively integrating with other tools.

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Creating Satisfied Customers with Help Desk Solutions

Today's business enterprises face everyday challenges of staying ahead in the face of cut-throat competition. In order to do so, it is foremost important for today’s businesses to provide stellar customer service by optimizing the help desk environment and providing for an efficient, cost effective, web based customer focused support. Wikipedia defines help desk as an information and assistance resource for troubleshooting problems with products. With technology involved, help desk support are provided to customers either through toll-free numbers, emails or website log-ins.

However, with technological enhancements and its wide use in every aspect of the business world, today’s help desk support is not just another IT service management tool and extends beyond providing technical support for IT infrastructure issues to being a single point of contact for more broadened  aspects and covers various services. To attend to a variety of service requests demands for a more organized format of working. The help desk solutions and requests are managed with the help of help desk software. This software facilitates tracking of the issues through a unique number assigned to user requests and are differentiated either as departmental or enterprise level needs.

The e-commerce and World Wide Web providing opportunities for enterprises both large and small to make their presence on the web, has led to an increasing need for help desk programs that can be accessible through these online webstores. Such help desk solutions provides the customers to receive online service support which leads to enhanced customer satisfaction, customer loyalty status and increased revenue besides maintaining good customer relationships.

Further, the web based help desk software with the feedback forms facilitates as a forum for customer inquiries that can help resolve root issues and minimize adverse impact on the business. Such help desk solutions which enables customer self-help and multiple levels of internal support are actually knowledge based applications that efficiently responds to repeated issues and automatically takes up request and adds it to the request queue, reducing the support staff time. The flexible settings allow the global managers to view all help desk issue requests across various departments.

The IT service organizations with their need to increase service efficiency make use of a number of management tools. These tools help in managing business requirements and improving workflow. However, with large number of workforce working on software development life cycles from off shore locations, enterprises need to deploy effective 24/7 help desk solutions that can handle all service requests and provide the necessary support for critical hardware and software issues. IT Help desk solutions targeting such department level needs ensures agility and high performance levels in every application lifecycle management.

 

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Solutions at Hand with IT Help Desk Software

Technological evolutions over the years have changed the way enterprises conduct business operations. The widespread use of the internet today has led most of the enterprises to move towards e-commerce and online markets to offer their products and services. Though offered with the help of technology it still can bring about issues which are either technology related or product related.

The large conglomerates have their IT professionals who with their expertise reach out to help the customers as far as technology is concerned. In case of the small and medium enterprises, the customer issues are generally handled with the use of help desk solutions. With most enterprises having an IT enabled business environment, the help desk is “single point of contact for users to receive help on any product related or technology related issues.
 

Even small issues may have a serious impact on the business continuity and loss of brand reputation. Hence setting up an IT help desk software is an important aspect in today's competitive and techno savvy business environment. Such help desk solutions will help enterprises reap benefits of not just fixing problems and preventing them but also pave way for effective service request management.

The leading service providers in the industry that offers best of the breed of IT help desk software to the enterprises, enables requests submitted by customers to be customized and managed by teams as per the service request management work flow. Further by linking the multiple IT service requests to an incident, ensures closure of all the dependent requests when the linked incidents are closed. The IT help desk software defines implements, enforces and automates the help desk processes while playing double role as per the environmental conditions. The built-in computation capability of the software makes way for automatic Service Level Agreement (SLA) calculations and allows for real-time calculations of various graphical and textual metrics.

One important abilities performed by the help desk software is a tracking. Tracking allows customers, employees, and administrators to follow help desk efficiently. The IT Help desk solution not only provides benefits through resolving technological issues during any application lifecycle management but also ensures efficient customer service to their clients and users leading to a favourable brand image.

Efficient customer service being crucial for the enterprises, the IT help desk works as a a medium to manage, report and resolve concerns identified by consumers and also acts as a marketing tool for ITSM Solution in government departments or business. Irrespective of the issues faced being minute errors or major failures, the IT help desk software enables the employees to fix these it. Further, it seamlessly integrates help desk with other components of IT Service Management including Change Management and Release Management.

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Ensure Successful IT Operations with Advanced ITSM Solutions

In any organization, the success of IT operations depends on well-defined processes and their consistent enforcement. In a serviceorganization, the implementation of ITSM solutions helps strengthen the business process and improve the quality of Service Operations and Service Delivery. ITSM or Information Technology Service Management helps companies make processes more efficient and effective and extends into additional areas like processes and implementation to provide value added functionality. ITSM has evolved to facilitate and optimize assessment, planning, and implementation of ITIL best practices.

Well-defined and optimally-implemented IT processes help organizations achieve Continual Service Improvements in various IT service areas such as Service Requests, Incidents, Problems and Change Management. Meeting customer expectations and understanding what is expected by a customer becomes amply clear to service providers. Therefore, in a customer-focused business operation, there is enhancement of customer satisfaction and the probability of customer retention. An effective ITSM solutions must offer a workflow based configurable global platform for implementing ITSM processes distributed over multiple geographic locations and across multiple organizations that can be accessed 24x7 over the Web.

IT service management personnel require solutions that can offer ways to solve user-reported problems and also ensure that such information are entered into a knowledgeable base for future reference. In any IT organization, the challenge is to be prepared to address any issues in these situations. Effective ITSM Solutions have a clear definition of the roles and responsibilities' of people participating in IT service operations. Even if different service groups are involved in a process, each of them knows their area of operations and responsibilities. There is a tremendous improvement in the inter-team communication and collaboration as different workgroups or roles get synchronized in a process.
 

A single solution with all the required built-in applications for IT service Management brings a great advantage to organizations small to very large. An effective ITSM solution needs to offer various benefits owing to its diverse functional abilities. Look for a reputed solution provider who can offer an appropriate ITSM solution that provides many benefits and has various functional abilities to seamlessly integrate with all the other components like Problem management, requirement management, the change management process.
 

An IT service organization that is well managed delivers excellent IT services by reducing the risks and maximizing the returns, while concurrently accomplishing enterprise goals. To establish a reputation, it is necessary that an organization concentrate on all process areas of IT service management or ITSM and invest in the best possible ITSM solution.
 

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Benefits of Implementing Help Desk Solutions

Customer assistance, regardless of what your enterprise offers is what is crucial for consumer satisfaction. Quality consumer satisfaction leads to business and greater revenue generation and is a core element that makes an organization successful in today’s competitive market scenario.

 

Therefore, help desk solutions enable a company to manage help desk operations that are essential for consumer satisfaction. The solution helps you to keep a track of emails and ensures that you don’t lose any of them. The solution makes a website appear professional and offer simpler methods to communicate with end users and consumers. It also enables the consumer to easily relate their concerns to a brand or enterprise.

 

Companies specializing in application lifecycle management with their innovative help desk software enables you to guide the consumer in such a manner that they report their issues to you. By ensuring the much required fields, such as model number, software version number and so on you are able to shut down the percentage of back-and–forth communications with consumers to point out the relevant details that needs to be resolved soon.

 

The advanced help desk software offers a brand new way for the numerous support professionals to carry on their work on various issues. Some of the selected help desk software functions are as follows:

 

* Help request management.

* Help request tracking.

* Managing a knowledge base or frequently asked questions.

* Resolving issues.

* Providing self-help resources.

 

IT Help Desk Software offered by service providers today helps in managing requests submitted through an easy process that comprises two service teams, namely Service Desk and Level One Support. This pre-defined procedure can be improved and personalized according to business needs and objectives of service request management workflow of the service provider. The software also supports multiple Helpdesk processes, and enables in the deployment of various workflows even within a single Helpdesk interface. The IT Help Desk Software has a task-based process engine that enables numerous parallel tasks to be  assigned by persons that are full time associated with the same help desk ticket. Most Help Desk Management solutions have in an inbuilt computation capacity which makes Service Level Agreement (SLA) calculations easy and automatic. Hence, if you wish to manage a larger site, the help desk software is a must. It helps in saving time, money and effort tracking.

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Agile Methodology for Quick and Successful Project Completion

To ensure a successful project completion and cut down the possibility of a project failure, many software development teams are continually looking for ways to enhance both the process and technology of software development life cycle.

With no software system being simple enough to complete a development that can be scripted from beginning to end in a linear fashion, there are plenty that are looking at a shift in the market towards the Agile ALM. Agile and ALM, once two distinct market segments, are now beginning to consolidate. As a result we now have what is called Agile ALM platforms. Although both the ALM and Agile communities concentrate on enhancing the current state of software development, the agile methodology uses the technology point of view to approach a challenge while agile looks at improving the process itself. 

The mutual goals and synergies of ALM and Agile are resulting in a number of Agile ALM vendors in the market. Scrum, the most popular implementation of the agile movement, has seen exponential growth in the past and teams using Scrum enjoy the advantage of accelerated product innovation, and minimal project rework. The best thing about Agile is that it preserves the interests of all stakeholders in a project, be it the client, project manager, development team or testing team. Agile promotes transparency and visibility, both of which are crucial aspects for the success of any project. To ensure successful project completion it is essential for your agile solution to maintain artifacts, entities and objects as well as projects, releases, sprints, product backlogs, daily scrum meetings, test cases, issues/changes. It is consequently important for an agile solution to be capable of dealing with several project releases, encapsulating all primary meeting phases, engage in optimized traceability relations and combine visual matters, process designs and handle implementations. 

Ideally effective application lifecycle management solutions should not require too much product support and maintenance, and be able to selectively import from various sources including previous projects. Managing backlogs and entities is an important step since these backlog items are assigned to different users independent of their locations, therefore agile solutions should allow for user access from anywhere anytime. It must also offer best solution that can allow users and project members to enter various Backlogs as Issues/ defects/ change and enhancement requests. It must also allow for routing of these items through suitable workflows based on the backlog types.

Partner with the right service-provider to ensure best process management and successful project completion.

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Why Software Change Management Solution is Important?

Software change management is an important discipline for an IT enterprise. In today's modern day IT enterprises, software automates a wide selection of business procedures. Software changes are in effect to the alterations made to the business processes. For instance, the manner in which an insurance agency offers life insurance policy quotes is encoded in its quote engine. Any unplanned alterations in the quote would also lead to unplanned changes in the quote types that the firm offers. Therefore, software changes need a careful management exactly the way a business process change does, as both are interrelated. 

 

Without a systematic change management process, IT organizations lack a complete understanding of the way the software running in production automates their business process. This comprises managing changes in software development, production and to related artifacts such as models, requirements and test cases. This also comprises the management of both individual changes as well as the coordination of dependant changes.

 

Furthermore, the new age development language techniques and tools are placed in IT enterprises in a manner to cater to the business requirements for speed by significantly increasing the productivity of the organization development. However, the increased productivity also tempts IT shops to roll software into production without applying any apt controls. This can result in wastage of more money than what got saved when the productivity increased. Maximized adoption of componentized software infrastructure is one of the crucial technical drives for an improved change management.

 

Today solution providers specializing in agile methodology have introduced advanced change management solutions that offer the following benefits:

 

· Simple to use - Users can use it with very less training.

 

· Has a single repository for application lifecycle entities - This means entities like Use cases, Requirement management, Change items, Test cases, Issues, Change packages and others are available in one repository. This effortlessly integrates change with other entities and leads to an improved cross-entity visibility.

 

· Offers a two-way requirements traceability association - End users can create or update Change package as they enter the change items. They can view the Change package status from Change items and can also manage Change items from Change package.

 

· Offers a process driven methodology - The solution enables enterprises to define their own change management procedures. As soon as the process is defined the system guides the specified resources for conducting the appropriate functions.

 

Furthermore, advanced change management solutions tracks and manages the software changes optimally with reactive and proactive impact analysis all through the software development life cycle. Automated change management process can be deployed and enforced for minimizing the chances of things going beyond hands to manage.

 

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Requirements traceability matrix