Vision document

Last updated

A Vision Document is a document that describes a compelling idea, project or other future state for a particular organization, product or service. The Vision defines the product/service to be developed specified in terms of the stakeholder's key needs and desired features. Containing an outline of the envisioned core requirements, it provides the contractual basis for the more detailed technical requirements. It is much shorter and more general than a product requirements document or a marketing requirements document, which outline the specific product plan and marketing plan respectively.

A product requirements document (PRD) is a document containing all the requirements to a certain product. It is written to allow people to understand what a product should do. A PRD should, however, generally avoid anticipating or defining how the product will do it in order to later allow interface designers and engineers to use their expertise to provide the optimal solution to the requirements.

Contents

Purpose

The Vision document provides a high-level executive summary for a project or other undertaking. For software development, for example, a Vision captures the essence of the envisioned solution in the form of high-level requirements and design constraints that provide stakeholders an overview of the system to be developed from a behavioral requirements perspective.

In software engineering and systems engineering, a functional requirement defines a function of a system or its component, where a function is described as a specification of behavior between outputs and inputs.

A Vision document provides input to the project approval process and is, therefore, closely related to the Business case. It communicates the fundamental "why and what" for the project and is a gauge against which all future decisions should be validated.

A business case captures the reasoning for initiating a project or task. It is often presented in a well-structured written document, but may also come in the form of a short verbal agreement or presentation. The logic of the business case is that, whenever resources such as money or effort are consumed, they should be in support of a specific business need. An example could be that a software upgrade might improve system performance, but the "business case" is that better performance would improve customer satisfaction, require less task processing time, or reduce system maintenance costs. A compelling business case adequately captures both the quantifiable and non-quantifiable characteristics of a proposed project.

A Vision document generally contains some or all of the following:

Timing

The Vision is created early in the Inception phase. It should evolve steadily during the earlier portion of the lifecycle, with changes slowing during Construction. It evolves in conjunction with the Business case and is meant to be revised as the understanding of requirements, architecture, plans, and technology evolves.

The Vision serves as input to use case modeling, and is updated and maintained as a separate artifact throughout the project. For agile projects, the Product Vision can feed into the user story development.

In software and systems engineering, a use case is a list of actions or event steps typically defining the interactions between a role and a system to achieve a goal. The actor can be a human or other external system. In systems engineering, use cases are used at a higher level than within software engineering, often representing missions or stakeholder goals. The detailed requirements may then be captured in the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) or as contractual statements.

In software development and product management, a user story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system. User stories are often written from the perspective of an end user or user of a system. They are often recorded on index cards, on Post-it notes, or in project management software. Depending on the project, user stories may be written by various stakeholders including clients, users, managers or development team members.

See also

Business plan Documented plan of business ideas, goals and methods

A business plan is a formal written document containing business goals, the methods on how these goals can be attained, and the time frame within which these goals need to be achieved. It also describes the nature of the business, background information on the organization, the organization's financial projections, and the strategies it intends to implement to achieve the stated targets. In its entirety, this document serves as a road map that provides direction to the business.

Innovation in its modern meaning is "a new idea, creative thoughts, new imaginations in form of device or method". Innovation is often also viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs. Such innovation takes place through the provision of more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, or business models that are made available to markets, governments and society. An innovation is something original and more effective and, as a consequence, new, that "breaks into" the market or society. Innovation is related to, but not the same as, invention, as innovation is more apt to involve the practical implementation of an invention to make a meaningful impact in the market or society, and not all innovations require an invention. Innovation often manifests itself via the engineering process, when the problem being solved is of a technical or scientific nature. The opposite of innovation is exnovation.

Planning fallacy concept in behavioral economics

The planning fallacy, first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979, is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed.



Related Research Articles

A marketing plan may be part of an overall business plan. Solid marketing strategy is the foundation of a well-written marketing plan. While a marketing plan contains a list of actions, without a sound strategic foundation, it is of little use to a business.

Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development is a process of writing and maintaining the source code, but in a broader sense, it includes all that is involved between the conception of the desired software through to the final manifestation of the software, sometimes in a planned and structured process. Therefore, software development may include research, new development, prototyping, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products.

User-centered design (UCD) or user-driven development (UDD) is a framework of processes in which usability goals, user characteristics, environment, tasks and workflow of a product, service or process are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process. User-centered design can be characterized as a multi-stage problem-solving process that not only requires designers to analyze and envision the way users are likely to consume a product, but also to validate their assumptions with regard to the user behavior in real world tests. These tests are conducted with/without actual users during each stage of the process from requirements, pre-production models and post production, completing a circle of proof back to and ensuring that "development proceeds with the user as the center of focus." Such testing is necessary as it is often very difficult for the designers of a product to understand intuitively what a first-time user of their design experiences, and what each user's learning curve may look like. User-centered design is common in the design industry and when used is considered to lead to increased product usefulness and usability.

Requirements analysis Engineering process

In systems engineering and software engineering, requirements analysis focuses on the tasks that determine the needs or conditions to meet the new or altered product or project, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, analyzing, documenting, validating and managing software or system requirements.

In product development and process optimization, a requirement is a singular documented physical or functional need that a particular design, product or process aims to satisfy. It is commonly used in a formal sense in engineering design, including for example in systems engineering, software engineering, or enterprise engineering. It is a broad concept that could speak to any necessary function, attribute, capability, characteristic, or quality of a system for it to have value and utility to a customer, organization, internal user, or other stakeholder. Requirements can come with different levels of specificity; for example, a requirement specification or requirement "spec" refers to an explicit, highly objective/clear requirement to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service.

Systems development life cycle Systems engineering term

In systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, the systems development life cycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life-cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system. The systems development lifecycle concept applies to a range of hardware and software configurations, as a system can be composed of hardware only, software only, or a combination of both. There are usually six stages in this cycle: analysis, design, development and testing, implementation, documentation, and evaluation.

A software requirements specification (SRS) is a description of a software system to be developed. It is modeled after business requirements specification(CONOPS), also known as a stakeholder requirements specification (StRS). The software requirements specification lays out functional and non-functional requirements, and it may include a set of use cases that describe user interactions that the software must provide to the user for perfect interaction.

Software prototyping is the activity of creating prototypes of software applications, i.e., incomplete versions of the software program being developed. It is an activity that can occur in software development and is comparable to prototyping as known from other fields, such as mechanical engineering or manufacturing.

A feasibility study is an assessment of the practicality of a proposed project or system. A feasibility study aims to objectively and rationally uncover the strengths and weaknesses of an existing business or proposed venture, opportunities and threats present in the natural environment, the resources required to carry through, and ultimately the prospects for success. In its simplest terms, the two criteria to judge feasibility are cost required and value to be attained.

Requirements management is the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders. It is a continuous process throughout a project. A requirement is a capability to which a project outcome should conform.

Systems architect profession in information and communications technology

The systems architect is an information and communications technology professional. Systems architects define the architecture of a computerized system in order to fulfill certain requirements. Such definitions include: a breakdown of the system into components, the component interactions and interfaces, and the technologies and resources to be used in its design and implementation.

Project Initiation Documentation

The Project Initiation Documentation (PID) - one of the most significant artifacts in project management, which provides the foundation for the business project.

(In the automation and engineering environments, the hardware engineer or architect encompasses the electronic engineering and electrical engineering fields, with subspecialities in analog, digital, or electromechanical systems.)

Project governance is the management framework within which project decisions are made. Project governance is a critical element of any project, since the accountabilities and responsibilities associated with an organization’s business as usual activities are laid down in their organizational governance arrangements; seldom does an equivalent framework exist to govern the development of its capital investments (projects). For instance, the organization chart provides a good indication of who in the organization is responsible for any particular operational activity the organization conducts. But unless an organization has specifically developed a project governance policy, no such chart is likely to exist for project development activity.

Digital Strategy is a form of strategic management and a business answer or response to a digital question, often best addressed as part of an overall business strategy. A digital strategy is often characterized by the application of new technologies to existing business activity and/or a focus on the enablement of new digital capabilities to their business. As is the case with its business strategy parent, a digital strategy can be formulated and implemented through a variety of different approaches. Formulation often includes the process of specifying an organization's vision, goals, opportunities and related activities in order to maximize the business benefits of digital initiatives to an organization. These can range from an enterprise focus, which considers the broader opportunities and risks digital can create and often includes customer intelligence, collaboration, new product/market exploration, sales and service optimization, enterprise technology architectures and processes, innovation and governance; to more marketing and customer-focused efforts such as web sites, mobile, eCommerce, social, site and search engine optimization, and advertising.

In project management, a project charter, project definition, or project statement is a statement of the scope, objectives, and participants in a project. It provides a preliminary delineation of roles and responsibilities, outlines the project objectives, identifies the main stakeholders, and defines the authority of the project manager. It serves as a reference of authority for the future of the project. The terms of reference are usually part of the project charter.

A problem statement is a concise description of an issue to be addressed or a condition to be improved upon. It identifies the gap between the current (problem) state and desired (goal) state of a process or product. Focusing on the facts, the problem statement should be designed to address the Five Ws. The first condition of solving a problem is understanding the problem, which can be done by way of a problem statement.

A user interface specification is a document that captures the details of the software user interface into a written document. The specification covers all possible actions that an end user may perform and all visual, auditory and other interaction elements.

Business requirements, also known as stakeholder requirements specifications (StRS), describe the characteristics of a proposed system from the viewpoint of the system's end user like a CONOPS. Products, systems, software, and processes are ways of how to deliver, satisfy, or meet business requirements. Consequently, business requirements are often discussed in the context of developing or procuring software or other systems.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.