When requirements keep changing, our job is to make change manageable

Requirements don’t finish at the workshop

In workshops and interviews, everyone hopes to “get the requirements right” in one go. But in real projects, many important needs only become visible after the new system is running in day-to-day operations.

Fields that seemed optional at design time become essential in practice. Process steps that were removed in the workshop turn out to be unavoidable in real life. Once people can click through real screens and see real data, they often realise: “Now I finally understand what I actually need.”

This is not a sign of poor preparation. It is simply how evolving businesses and complex systems behave. Practice exposes what theory could not fully anticipate.

The real issue is unmanaged change, not changing minds

If every new insight is treated as a one-off change, projects quickly run into trouble:

Repeated rework. The same logic is removed, rebuilt, and then rebuilt again, each time from scratch.
Unclear cost. Business teams feel that “every small tweak is expensive”, without seeing which interfaces, reports, and scripts are affected.
Version confusion. Test and production behave differently, and no one is fully sure which version is live.

Everyone may agree that the changes are justified, but no one is happy with the time, cost, and risk that come with them.

Use software engineering discipline to manage business change

We treat evolving requirements as a change-management and engineering problem, not as “scope creep to be blamed on the business”. The goal is not to stop change, but to put it on rails:

Versioned changes, not ad-hoc edits. Every configuration change, script update, and integration tweak is tracked with a version and a change history. We can always answer: “What exactly changed between version 1.2 and 1.3?”
Layered environments. Ideas start in a sandbox, are validated in a test environment, rehearsed in pre-production, and only then promoted to production as a change package.
Automated regression tests. Key flows (order-to-cash, purchasing, inventory, finance) have automated tests. Before each release, we run them to make sure new changes do not break what already works.
Planned change windows. Small changes are batched into regular release cycles; structural changes are planned and communicated in advance. Business teams know what can move quickly, and what must move carefully.

Why structure lowers cost in a high-change environment

On the surface, this adds structure. Over the life of a system, it actually reduces waste and surprises:

The same area is not rebuilt multiple times — we iterate from a known baseline instead of starting over.
When someone says “go back to the previous version”, we know exactly which version that is.
The impact of each change on budget and timeline is visible and can be discussed, not guessed.
The relationship between client and consultant becomes healthier: we work together to decide when to change and how far to go.

Our stance: support change, but keep it disciplined

We start from two simple beliefs:

Business change is normal. We do not pretend that requirements can be frozen forever at the kick-off workshop.
Engineering discipline makes change affordable. With proper versioning, rollback paths, automated testing, and environment strategy, necessary change does not have to mean chaos or uncontrolled cost.

In other words, our job is not to stop requirements from evolving. Our job is to make that evolution traceable, reversible, and economically sensible.