Scoring the right requirements To start with Sarah sat down with a cup of coffee and tried to write

down all of the requirements she could think of. She thought through the complete process of a t ypical wedding job for Beauty in Bloom from start to finish and picked out the pertinen t data points that any software should be able to track. She was careful to consider th e level of detail required for each entry. To say that the business management tools would have to be able to handle financial information was too vague, but stipulating two de cimal places for money fields was too detailed. She also tried hard to avoid including generic software features like password controlled access to the system . No vendor would offer a software solution withou t this, so including it in the requirements checklist would be overkill. Once she had a long list in front her Sarah began the process of scoring. By assigning a score of 1 to 5 to each requirement, where 5 denoted an absolutely essential requirement and 1 denoted a wish that would be fulfilled in an ideal world, she was able to see her business core demands. Several cups of coffee later, Sarah had a list of Beauty in Bloom s key requiremen ts, but she was still agonizing over specific scores. She was anxious about missing anyt hing that would come back to bite her later. The last thing she wanted was to forget something really important for her business and end up with a management tool th at didn t do the job. It was time to get a second opinion.