INCOSE Canada Webinar - The Cost of Bad Requirements: A Systems Engineering Perspective

Requirements failures are not rare events. They are a predictable outcome of how most engineering teams manage requirements today, with tools and processes that treat requirements as static documents rather than as connected elements of a living system.

This session examines why requirements quality has become a critical bottleneck in complex product development. We begin with the scale of the problem: modern systems can carry hundreds of thousands of requirements, each connected to dozens of others, yet most teams are still managing them in spreadsheets, word processors, and legacy platforms designed for a world twenty years behind us. The gap between system complexity and requirements tooling is where cost accumulates silently, as requirements debt.

We walk through the failure modes that appear consistently across programs: missing verification links, duplicate specifications, ambiguous requirements, outdated specs, and unknown ownership. Using documented industry examples, we show how each compounds over time and what the business case for addressing them actually looks like.

The second half of the session focuses on what high-performing teams do differently: treating requirements as connected graphs rather than rows in a document, shifting validation left, maintaining traceability continuously rather than assembling it before reviews, and using AI to monitor the model rather than just accelerate writing. We close with a live demonstration of these principles in a real systems engineering environment, followed by an open Q&A session.

Designed for practicing systems engineers, requirements managers, and program leads.

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