We work in software development in the finance sector – releasing a new version of our software every quarter. Whilst we are developing a release, we take requirement submissions from multiple customer projects happening at the time, as well as requests from past customer projects that didn’t make previous releases.

When managing a new release, we receive input via our internal analysts (each representing requirements of their customer). This involves a myriad of conversations and document review with multiple analysts. It’s hard to make sense of it all when it’s a scattered mess across my email box. Usually, it gets too confusing, and we need a meeting to just make sense of it all.

In order to manage this better I need the process to be organised better. If each submission had a one source of truth document and conversation thread, then I could easily keep up and look back at the history of each submission.

Given each customer project has a Team, I would like to be part of the ‘Analysis’ channel in each Team where I can have these conversations and review. This way if I’m dealing with conversations across 7 customer requirements, I can easily find and access those conversations where they belong. To manage this process, I will also use a Microsoft List in my Release Management Team that is a list of shortcut links to each requirements file.

When it takes under 1 min to retrieve and have confidence, I’m looking at the latest version of a customer analysis file – and with the confidence that I’m not missing any stray conversations.

When I go from the usual 70 to zero emails about this phase of our release – and less meetings