Engineering the needs and requirements of a complex system

The development of a system (product, service, organization) begins with some key activities: identifying the problem or opportunity in context, defining needs, analyzing them and translating them into technical requirements.

The level of precision, consistency and completeness of the expression of needs, and then of the technical requirements, determines whether the solution will meet its technical objectives, its cost and its delivery time.

Stakeholders' needs and the system's technical requirements must express the problem or opportunity and its constraints (and not elements of solutions) in fair, clear and unambiguous terms, so that they can be exploited by the development players (designers, integrators, etc.) whose points of view and means of expression are often different.

This sheet will help you :

• define the needs and requirements of a system to be designed ;

• pose a problem in order to develop a solution ;

• identify an opportunity to create a new product or service, or a new organization;

• express the system's expected characteristics.