Effective Requirement Documents:

Proven Practices and Lessons Learned

 Members-Only Roundtable

 Tuesday,  September 16, 2008

5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Rivers Club, One Oxford Centre-4th floor

301 Grant St., Pittsburgh PA 15219 

A requirement defines what a product must do or have in order to meet a customer  need. Requirements are collected in Market Requirement Documents (MRDs) and/or Product Requirement Documents (PRDs). These documents become a critical communications link between the market and product development. It's crucial to accurately write and communicate requirements to achieve product success.

In this PSN Member Roundtable, two practice masters - Barry Christenson, Director of Product Management with ANSYS, and Mark Collins, Senior Marketing Manager with Thermo Fisher Cellomics - will describe the documents and processes their companies use to communicate requirements for products. Once requirements have been gathered, these practitioners take differing paths in developing these requirement documents for product development. You will benefit from understanding their approaches, best practices and pitfalls to avoid. 

We will start the Member Roundtable meeting by asking these questions:

• Do you use Market Requirements Documents (MRDs), Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) or both? What is the difference? When are they used?
• Who is involved in creating and maintaining these documents? Who owns the document?
• What is the content and structure of these documents? What are your good practices and lessons learned with writing these documents?
• What process do you use to create and approve MRDs and/or PRDs?
• How has your development of these documents changed in recent years and what changes do you expect in the future?

You will have ample opportunity to ask the practice masters your specific questions throughout the roundtable meeting and get useful advice, answers and ideas.

ABOUT THE PRACTICE MASTERS

Barry Christenson is the Director of Product Management for ANSYS. The company designs, develops, markets and globally supports engineering simulation software used to predict how product designs will behave in manufacturing and real-world environments. Prior to joining ANSYS, Mr. Christenson worked at Delphi Automotive Systems (formerly GM/Delco) in various engineering and project management roles related to automotive emission control systems for Latin American markets.  Mr. Christenson holds a BS degree in mechanical engineering from North Dakota State University and an MS in mechanical engineering from Kettering University.

Mark Collins is the Senior Marketing Manager for Thermo Fisher Scientific. He has responsibility for the Cellomics High Content Screening product line used for cellular knowledge extraction to accelerate drug discovery. Mr. Collins is responsible for the commercialization and market strategy of the products that make up Cellomics HCS Platform including instrumentation, image analysis and informatics. He has over 20 years experience in drug discovery, software development and bioinformatics. Mr. Collins' former employers include start-up biotech and software companies as well as large pharmaceutical manufacturers. He has authored over 40 articles in the computational biology/machine learning area related to drug discovery and holds several patents in natural product drug discovery and machine learning approaches to drug discovery. Mr. Collins holds a PhD degree.

AGENDA

5:30 to 6:00 pm Networking over food/beverages

6:00 to 6:15 Opening remarks and introductions

6:15 to 7:45 Moderated Q&A and discussion with practice masters

7:45 to 8:00 Recap meeting takeaways

8:00 to 8:30 Additional networking

FEES AND REGISTRATION

This roundtable is limited to PSN Members only. Capacity is 20 attendees.

PSN Members can attend at no charge. (See PSN Membership to join.)

Pre-registration is required.  PSN Members can register online or by sending an e-mail to: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it.

After you register, you will receive further details for participating in this Roundtable event about one week prior to the program.

CANCELLATIONS

Please let us know in advance if you need to cancel so we can open your seat for another member. Write to us at events@productstrategynetwork.com.

QUESTIONS:

Contact the PSN by e-mail at events@productstrategynetwork.com, or by phone: 1-888-580-3329, ext. 2.