ABSTRACT
This chapter is aimed at those personnel operating at the customer interface with responsibility for defining product requirements, negotiating contracts and handling customer feedback.
A process for determining product requirements should be designed so that it takes as its input the identified need for a product and passes this through several stages where requirements from various sources are determined, balanced and confirmed as the definitive requirements that form the basis for product realization. The input can either be a customer-specific requirement or the market specification that results from market research (see Chapter 14 on Customer focus) or a sales order for an existing product. However, this is not blue sky stuff – remember the product realization process is triggered by a customer placing a demand on the organization either because it has a product to sell or a capability to offer. The output may indeed be presented in several documents – the product requirement specification containing the hardware and software requirements and the service requirement specification containing the service requirements. Alternatively where service is secondary, the requirement may be contained in the contract.
