This concept of flat world resulting from the convergence of 'flatteners' or factors as brought out by Thomas Friedman in his international bestselling book “The World is Flat” has made it easier for enterprises from the developing countries to compete with their counterparts in developed countries.

1. Requirements Management–A Continuous Communication Process
This concept of flat world resulting from the convergence of 'flatteners' or factors as brought
out by Thomas Friedman in his international bestselling book “The World is Flat” has made it
easier for enterprises from the developing countries to compete with their counterparts in
developed countries. However, considering supply-chain as one of the major factor or
'flattener' makes it necessary for global enterprises to work more collaboratively with their
suppliers to achieve the required success.
Such considerations makes a definite call for understanding the requirements across the
stakeholders. Supply chain, defined as “a method of collaborating horizontally among suppliers,
retailers and customers to create value” thus needs an effective process to understand the
requirements and ensure success of the business, irrespective of the industry. Defined by
Wikipedia as “the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and agreeing on
requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders”,
requirements management is a continuous process throughout a project.
The requirements management process begins with the analysis, includes eliciting the objectives
and constraints of enterprises, planning for requirements and integrating these with the
attributes while working on other information delivering against requirements, and changes for
these. Establishing such a traceability helps enterprises in managing and reporting requirements
to the fulfillment of stakeholder interests. In a competitive business environment wherein the
customer demands for upgrade applications are on the rise, enterprises need to ensure effective
application lifecycle management across various industry verticals.
The requirements management tools and solutions from the leading service providers offers
enterprises rich and configurable global platform for capturing the requirements, collaborating
their development with the project goals and deliverables and across diverse teams both locally
and globally. Their tool ensures that irrespective of their location, all developers work from the
same platform resulting in a top-quality application that matches with user requirements.
The requirements management solutions involves communication between the stakeholders for
the adjustments required in the project development. The requirement management tools from
the industry leaders are thus in-built with the capabilities necessary for effective and effortless
management of requirements accessible through a highly user-friendly interface. Being
completely web based , this enables effective telecommuting, better management and control of
offshore projects and collaboration of service partners and functional groups. The major features
of the tools includes requirements gathering, parsing, management, traceability matrix , base
lining and intelligent reporting which through a process-driven methodology enables project
teams to effectively manage and map requirements.
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