There “Shall” Be A Niche
Someone (famous?) once said that a good strategy to employ to ensure that you get something done is to publicize what you’re going to do for all to see:
As you can see, my new found friend, multi-book author Jon M. Quigley (check out his books at Value Transformation LLC), proposed, and I accepted, a collaborative effort to write a book on the topic of product requirements. D’oh!
Why the “D’oh!”? As you might guess, there are a bazillion “requirements” books already out there in the wild. Here is just a sampling of some of those that I have access to via my safaribooksonline.com account:
Of course, I haven’t read them all, but I have read both of Mr. Wiegers’s books and the Hatley/Hruschka book – all very well done. I’ve also read two great requirements books (not on the above list) by my favorite software author of all time, Mr. Gerry Weinberg: “Exploring Requirements” and “Are Your Lights On?“.
Jon and I would love to differentiate our book from the current crop – some of which are timeless classics. It’s not that we expect to eclipse the excellence of Mr. Weinberg or Mr. Wiegers, we’re looking for a niche. Perhaps a “Head First” or “Dummies” approach may satisfy our niche “requirement” :). Got any ideas?
The biggest obstacle, and it is indeed huge, in front of me is simply that:
“My ambition is handicapped by laziness” – Charles Bukowski
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Bulldozer00's Blog 
This may be totally off track but I had an amazing dream last night where I was a super confident and inspired manager. I said to my team “Each of you need to go away and come back with a list of 5 things that people would regularly could to us for.” Once I received the lists of 5 key items from each of the team my plan was to zone in on that combined list and give it our full attention – that would be our niche!
If nothing else, I woke up feeling inspired and confident :-). Good luck with your venture.
What a great dream. Discovering and exploiting sustainable niches has become exponentially more challenging in the age of the internet. The internet is the perfect, low cost, platform for for exploiting niches – open to all. On the other hand, newly discovered niches are often filled in the blink of an eye for the same reason. On top of that, if the niche is profitable, copycats spring up like mushrooms before your second blink.
So true! Thanks for reading 🙂
Reblogged this on aquaeco and commented:
This is a funny and interesting blog post
Awesome post, some books I have some are now on order.
Add to the list
The Art of Systems Architecting, Maier and Rechtin
Requirements Engineering, Sommerville and Sawyer
The Requirements Engineering Handbook, Young
Systems Requirements Analysis, Grady
Software Requirements Analysis and Specification, Davis
Thx for the great additions Glenn. I went to a reqs. Seminar given by Alan Davis back in the 80s. Had several discussions with him regarding the diffs between requirements and design.
But “Johnny still can’t write requirements” and neither can most of the vendors providing requirement management and development tools. Examples of poor requirements is a target rich environment!
Bulldozer0, What is your strategy to change the culture so that Johnny, might one day write viable requirements? Not poking, just really curious about your strategy. I’ve been interested in the topic for quite some time as the guy having to test and sell-off systems.
I’m very influenced by A. Wayne Wymore’s work as well as the work of Patrice Micouin (Property-Model Methodology and property-based requirements).
Dunno if I agree that a culture change is needed for someone to learn to write requirements well. I think you can learn to write good requirements regardless of the culture you’re in.
One strategy is to define what a “good” requirement is and present lots of examples, both good and bad. That’s what all the current good books do; and there are (too) many good books. That’s why we’re looking for a “niche”. If we don’t find/discover one, I’ll probably bailout of the effort, even if Jon wants to move forward. Wouldn’t wanna spend a ton o’ time writing “just another requirements book”. 🙂