# 5W2H requirements builder

> Answer 36 questions about who, what, where, when, why, how and how much. Get a shortlist of technologies, a plan and a brief you can hand to a vendor, saved behind a link you can share.

- **Page** - https://iotready.com/tools/5w2h-analysis

## What it's for

Most traceability projects that go wrong went wrong before anyone bought anything. Someone chose RFID where QR would have done, or built a system the operators then worked around. 5W2H is a way of forcing the awkward questions early: who, what, where, when, why, how and how much. It came out of Japanese quality management and Toyota's production system, and it's still the quickest way to find out your stakeholders disagree.

Take it into a workshop with operations, IT, finance and quality in the room. About two hours is enough. Fill it in together, argue about the answers that don't match, and give each one a priority.

## Saving it and sharing it

There are no accounts. Until you press **Save and get a link**, your answers stay in this browser and nowhere else. After that, they're stored on our server behind a long random link. Anyone who has that link can open and edit the workspace, so send it to the people who should. There's also a read-only link, for showing the result to people who shouldn't change it.

The link sits after the `#` in the address, which your browser never sends to a server, so it doesn't appear in our logs. If you'd like to be sure you can find it again, we'll email it to you.

We delete a workspace that has gone a year without a change. Treat it as a notebook, not an archive, and keep anything confidential out of it.

## The shortlist

The six questions under the shortlist heading are the ones that decide most technology choices: what you're identifying, how many reads a day, whether you need to read many at once, whether you need to know where things are all the time, what a tag can cost, and whether there's metal or liquid nearby. The answers score each technology and the best three come back with the reasons.

It's a starting point for the conversation with a vendor, not a recommendation. Most sites end up with two technologies, because a carton and a forklift are different problems.

If RFID comes out near the top, the [RFID range calculator](https://iotready.com/tools/rfid-range-calculator.md) will tell you whether a particular tag and reader will do the distance.

## The spreadsheet

If you'd rather work offline, the same questions and the three worked examples are in the [Excel template](https://iotready.com/downloads/5w2h-analysis-template.xlsx). The longer explanation of the method is in [the 5W2H guide](https://iotready.com/insights/5w2h-analysis-operations-traceability.md).