‘There’s something else missing here’: requirements specification in changing circumstances of work and design

This paper is primarily concerned with gathering requirements in the context of work-oriented design, although its methodological ‘recommendations’ are readily applicable in other contexts. We preface those recommendations with a consideration of changing circumstances of design. We suggest that not only are circumstances of design changing but also, and perhaps more importantly, circumstances of work are changing; continuously. How design may gather requirements in the face of continuous change is our central methodological concern. Business process reengineering (BPR) offers one potential, and increasingly influential, solution to the problem in focusing on ‘core’ processes. In considering an ethnographic study of process modelling, we suggest that BPR approaches, while highly relevant, ‘miss’ something in generating requirements. That missing ‘thing’ is the ‘real world, real time’ practices whereby processes are produced and, thus, the actual work that systems must support and transform if they are ‘resonate’ with the practical circumstances of their use. We outline a framework for bringing those practices to bear on the specification of requirements.