Most organizations have come to a realization that they need to apply more process to their requirements gathering efforts. One of the common first steps in support of this is to develop common templates to be used for each document. The templates contain subheadings that are associated with many common groupings of requirements, and are designed to ensure that each type of requirement at least gets thought about.

So why do many projects that use good templates still fail?

Projects still fail because the templates are often used as a substitute for good requirements analysis training. Requirements analysis is more than just thinking about the different categories of requirements. One of the leading causes of project failure is missing requirements. Templates help make sure you don’t miss a category of requirements, but do almost nothing to ensure that the requirements within a category are complete.