It’s a good thing PMs are naturally suited to doing things the hard way. Unlike software developers, who can choose between various powerful integrated development environments like Visual Studio or a turbo-charged Emacs or VI environment, we PMs normally use nothing more powerful than Microsoft Word and Excel. (Some of the more modern amongst us use wikis or other web-based content management systems – but the same limitations typically apply.) For the most important aspects of product planning and requirements management — prioritizing, tracking, moving features from one release to another, calculating the ROI for a particular feature or theme — Word and Excel are pretty much crap. Not many software developers would stay at a company that gave them Notepad as their development environment, but that’s the world most PMs live in today.
Until recently there were only a few, expensive choices — DOORS, from Telelogic, and IBM’s Requisite Pro. Now a number of new players have entered the field, such as Accept 360 from Accept Software, FeaturePlan from Ryma Software, Focal Point (recently acquired by Telelogic), and Rally from Rally Software.
After looking at a few of these (and some I like better than others – perhaps we’ll have a review in the future), I started thinking about creating an open-source requirements management tool, and what features it would need to be compelling. As a first step I created a mindmap (using Freemind, a great open source mindmapping tool) of the key features. This map will be useful to anyone evaluating a tool to support product managers, so here it is, in HTML format and MindMap format.
BTW, in October the Silicon Valley Product Managers Association hosted a mini-shootout between three of these products — Focal Point, Accept, and FeaturePlan. They have a summary of the meeting on their site.
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