What every records system specification gets wrong.

Is that it doesn’t focus enough on quantitative analysis of tasks based on their frequency and time taken.

Think of the following two functional requirements:

1. Must provide for storage of records.
2. Must provide role based access.

Equal weight.

Here’s the problem.

If it takes 30 seconds to store a record.

And 4 hours to configure a users access permissions.

The cost to the organisation of storing records will still be tens of thousands of times higher over the life of the system.

So we give equal weight to factors of unequal cost and value.

And we’ll give a system that takes 30 seconds, and a system that takes 10 seconds the same score.

And then wonder about user adoption.