Assessing the impact of requirements review on quality outcomes

Studies demonstrate that differences in how product development organizations and product realization organizations interpret requirements can lead to poor-quality outcomes. Other research shows that in comparison to communicating requirements inside an organization, communicating requirements in buyer-supplier relationships can be more difficult and has been identified as a source of rework, poor quality, and increased costs. The Raytheon Company identified misaligned requirements interpretation between the company and its suppliers as a source of program performance inefficiency and therefore instituted a collaborative requirements review process between the company and its critical suppliers. This study examines the impact of these requirements reviews on quality outcomes and demonstrates that these reviews result in positive quality outcomes. In addition, correlation analysis shows a relationship between conducting the requirements reviews and a reduction in failure modes that are characterized by high detection and remediation effort. Considered broadly, our methodology can be applied to other program performance improvement efforts to test their impact on quality outcomes and to reveal related failure modes.