Now

You
See It
When gathering requirements gets murky,
visual modeling can clear the way.
BY ALMA BAHMAN
PORTRAITS BY NICK SIMONITE

54

PM NETWORK MAY 2015 WWW.PMI.ORG

Joy Beatty,
Seilevel, Austin,
Texas, USA

MAY 2015 PM NETWORK

55

Its easy to get

bogged down
in the details.
If done correctly, modeling
will remove redundancy
and ambiguity in data.
Shilpa Gnaneshwar, PMP, GE Aviation, Bengaluru, India

56

PM NETWORK MAY 2015 WWW.PMI.ORG

As project managers determine the requirements

needed to get a project from inception to completion, what may seem simple enough at first can
quickly grow into a tangled morass of requirements
and their myriad dependencies. Visual models can
streamline those complicated details, turning them
into a discernible, easy-to-follow story.
Visual modelswhether tables, flowcharts,
maps, matrices, tree diagrams or othersturn
overwhelming amounts of intricate text into readily analyzable images. They thus shorten projects
development phases and increase productivity, says
Shilpa Gnaneshwar, PMP, project manager at GE
Aviation, a PMI Global Executive Council member,
Bengaluru, India. When presented in text format,
relationships among requirements can remain stubbornly opaque; modeling makes them apparent. If
done correctly, Ms. Gnaneshwar says, modeling
will remove redundancy and ambiguity in data.
Whats at stake is much more than a simplified
project management process, however. A model
that clearly illuminates a projects requirements has
a direct impact on its chances of success. Almost 40
percent of unsuccessful projects fail primarily due

SAMPLE MODEL: FEATURE TREES

IMAGE COURTESY OF SEILEVEL

Feature trees organize features into groups,

capturing the entire scope of a project in a
single, high-level visual model.

to inaccurate requirements gathering, according to

PMIs 2015 Pulse of the Profession: Capturing the
Value of Project Management.
The value of a picture is that its a neutral, agnostic language, says Howard Podeswa, CEO of Noble
Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It draws a logical
connection between things.

PICTURE THIS
Modeling might seem like an extraneous, timeconsuming activity, but spending a bit more time
up front can save time in the end. When people
think about models, they sometimes think, I dont
have time, I can barely get the requirements done,
says Joy Beatty, vice president of SeiLabs at Seilevel,
Austin, Texas, USA. But you should take that time
to do it now, instead of having to do it later.
A visual model doesnt have to be a great work of
art. You can use templates and frameworks, Ms.
Beatty says. With each initiative, project managers
can customize those templates.
Rather than using the standard term requirements gathering, Ms. Beatty prefers requirements
elicitation. The word gathering suggests that

The value
of a picture
is that its
a neutral,
agnostic
language.
It draws
a logical
connection
between
things.
Howard Podeswa,
Noble Inc., Toronto,
Ontario, Canada

requirements are sitting out in the open, she says,

like berries waiting to be picked. Requirements
elicitation means posing the right questions to get
the needed information. Visual models can help
project practitioners understand what those questions should beand which stakeholders should
answer them.
Ms. Beatty likens the process of eliciting requirements to building a house. You can build a house
without talking to the people who are going to live
in it, but youll build a better house if you did.
A project doesnt have to be reduced to just one
visual model. While every house, for example, has
the same basic componentsfour walls, a roof
and a doora feature-tree model could diagram
residents specific needs. The models trunk represents the house while a branch represents each
bedroom, with smaller branches describing the
rooms size, the type of flooring and so on. From
there, a process-flow model could map out the
steps for the contractor, from hiring subcontractors to applying for permits to procuring materials.
Even blueprints are a visual model, Ms. Beatty says:
Heres the floor plan, heres the electrical, and

MAY 2015 PM NETWORK

57

When people think

about models, they
sometimes think, I dont
have time, I can barely
get the requirements
done. But you should
take that time to do it
now, instead of having
to do it later.
Joy Beatty

58

PM NETWORK MAY 2015 WWW.PMI.ORG

SAMPLE MODEL: BUSINESS OBJECTIVE MODEL

IMAGE COURTESY OF SEILEVEL

Organizations use business objective models (BOMs) to document

a projects value. BOMs comprise business problem/objective pairs
that culminate in a product concept. Success metrics in these models state the goals against which the project will be measured.

everything is in the blueprint and laid out on top

of each other.
If visual modeling relies on the old adage that a
picture is worth a thousand words, Ms. Beatty finds
another number equally useful: seven. Based on the
work of psychologist George A. Miller, PhD, Ms.
Beatty uses this concept to explain the useful role of
visual requirements models. As Dr. Miller showed,
peoples short-term memory can absorb about
seven new things at a time, give or take two. Ms.
Beatty often sees this play out on projects.
One such project aimed to build a game-like simulation for a government contractor. The customer
handed us their list of 2,000 requirements, and said,
Help us figure out if were missing anything, Ms.
Beatty says. Not only would parsing through the list
of 2,000 items take the project team too much time,
but Ms. Beatty still wouldnt have been able to figure
out everything the project needed.
As I was reading through, somewhere around
number 10, I forgot what number one was about,
Ms. Beatty says. Reading through is impossible for
comparing requirements and looking for redundancies or missing pieces.
Ms. Beatty and her team mapped the list of
requirements onto models: requirements mapping matrices, process flows and context diagrams.
When it was just a list, no one really could understand the essence of what the system did, but these
models tied the requirements together, she says.

They helped the project by organizing the requirements to tell a story.

The team also discovered missing requirements
and project areas that had no written requirements
at all.

ON THE SAME PAGE

Visual models can help ensure that all project team
members share the same understanding of the
projects requirementsespecially since different
people see the same things differently,
Mr. Podeswa says. While team members might grasp only their respective
project components, a model displays
the whole picture.
Not everyone thinks at the same
level, says Pierre Gagn, president of
Insurance Frameworks Inc., Quebec
City, Quebec, Canada. Some think
close to the ground and some think
strategically.
And some team members can get
so mired in the technical details of a
project that they miss critical pieces
of information.
When a Canadian regional government had to
update its human resources software, Mr. Podeswa
was brought on to help select and purchase a new
system. He started modeling with a group of business analysts who had already been working on

As I got more
involved in the
up-front aspects
of projects, I
realized that these
models, if drawn
at the beginning
of a project, would
reveal to me missing
requirements.
Howard Podeswa

MAY 2015 PM NETWORK

59

SAMPLE MODEL: PROCESS FLOWS

IMAGE COURTESY OF SEILEVEL

Process flow models include process steps connected by directional arrows that indicate all possible paths. These models
have clearly defined starting and ending points. They can also feature other symbols, as seen below.

the project. Minutes into the conversation, Mr.

Podeswa says, the group members realized they
had missed a vital piece of information that would
inform the new system: the fact that employees
could belong to more than one union.
As I got more involved in the up-front aspects
of projects, I realized that these models, if drawn
at the beginning of a project, would reveal to me
missing requirements, he says. Modeling helped
strip away the technical steps from the software and
offered a clear look at requirements and rules, Mr.
Podeswa says.
Like Ms. Beatty, Mr. Podeswa said that clear
view helped him know what he required from the
projects stakeholders. Missing elements in the
diagram pointed to questions I still needed to ask
my stakeholders, he says.

FILLING IN THE BLANKS

Even when project practitioners dont have an
abundance of project data, modeling can help them
fill in the blanks. While working on a software project, Ms. Gnaneshwar used models to make sense of
a complicated competition analysis.
I was doing a market analysis on the possible
modules for a software product expansion. The
analysis was based on geographic region, the business segment, the module affordability, economic
zones and many other factors, she says.

60

PM NETWORK MAY 2015 WWW.PMI.ORG

After finding limited data in text form online

from various sources, trying to consolidate and
analyze the information was getting to be a challenge, she says. Trying to transform it to a format
that I could deduce from was not easy either.
To bolster the analysis, Ms. Gnaneshwar relied
on visual models. Plotting data onto line graphs
helped identify customers inclinations toward certain software and other areas the company intended to invest in. Maps visually
highlighted relevant regions and displayed
customers levels of interest. Modeling the
data revealed the trends Ms. Gnaneshwar
was looking for more quickly than if she
had parsed through each text document.
It is like a jigsaw puzzle, she says.
You have bits and pieces of information,
and you are trying to build a picture out
of it.
A model can be as complicated as a
process flowchart with hundreds of steps
or as simple as a tree diagram with two
or three branches. The project manager
must determine when to use a model,
what model to use and how detailed to
make it, Mr. Podeswa says.
Just like a recipe book, you pick what you want
from the recipe and make it your own, Mr. Gagn
says. PM

When it was just a

list, no one really
could understand
the essence of
what the system
did, but these
models tied the
requirements
together. They
helped the project
by organizing the
requirements to
tell a story.
Joy Beatty