Projects, but better. That’s what we’re aiming to do at Usable.

For many, many years the Usable team have been doing projects of various kinds. We’ve been developers, project managers, product managers, and we’ve run our own businesses. We’ve all known the pain of a project that isn’t going to plan. Even the best managed projects have their problems, and problem projects are expensive, late or fail entirely.

We recognised this problem, and we recognised the solution: requirements management software. Unfortunately though, as it stood before we started Usable, requirements management software was either horribly expensive or just plain horrible. Enterprise tools for companies designing a new airliner are available if you’ve got the money to spend, but for the majority of businesses those tools are simply beyond their reach. At the other end of the spectrum there are tools available, stand alone or as part of a project management suite, but they’re not really requirements management: they don’t work the way that requirements management ought to. All too often they’re actually task management. Requirements are not tasks.

Requirements management means you manage what your project’s end goal is about continuously throughout the project lifecycle. By embracing the inevitable changes, by tracking and managing them, and by communicating them to everyone involved in the project you can effectively ensure that everyone is going in the same direction – people missing a line in an email that changes something important is a thing of the past.

Usable Requirements is shaping up to be something that brings most of the power of the enterprise tools to small and medium enterprise. We have real-time collaboration, document import to manage existing requirement documentation, a unique requirements editor that gives you the power of Word with the intelligence of a requirements management application. More than these features though, we’ve thought long and hard about how to best management changes and tracking, we’ve gone to great lengths to make the application beautiful and easy to handle. Things work the way they should. We’re writing documentation, but we don’t want you to have to read it. You’ll be able to pick up our software and run with it, just like you’re used to with Word or GMail.

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