About this Course

By mastering the project requirements process, business analysts and project managers can better manage customers’ expectations and satisfy their needs. Requirements discovery is the first step to a successful project. This workshop focuses on the skills necessary to thoroughly gather requirements from stakeholders, procedures, system components, and various business documents. Quality requirements statements are the next step in a successful project. This workshop provides the best practices to write specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and traceable, requirements statements. Finally, requirements must be properly communicated, validated and signed off to achieve a successful project outcome. By the end of this course, participants will have accomplished all three. Overall the workshop is designed to give participants the skills, hands-on application and confidence they need to tackle any project by producing and gaining approval for a quality requirements document.

Audience Profile

Those who need an advanced and detailed approach to defining business/technical requirements and implementing new processes or methodologies.

Prerequisites

Previous professional experience in business analysis is required.

Course Outline

1. Introduction

• What is a Requirement?
• Workshop Objectives
• Analysis Work
• Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) Companies
• Workshop Agenda
• The Cost of Bad Requirements
• The System Development Life Cycle
• Workshop Logistics

2. Requirements Process

• Requirements
• Types of Requirements
• Developing Requirements – Where do We Begin?
• Current State vs. Future State
• Discovery
• Performing Enterprise Analysis
• Requirements Documentation
• The Requirements Attributes for Traceability to the Source
• Requirement Identification
• Organizing Requirements
• Requirements Exclusions – Out of Scope
• The Phased or Iterative Approach
• Dictionary of Terms
• Planning on Requirements Work

3. Requirement Essentials

• How Shall We Write Requirements?
• SMART Requirements
• Guidelines for Documenting Requirements
• Quality Requirements?
• The Grammar of Requirements
• Ambiguous Words
• Pronouns
• Synonyms
• Negative Words
• Adverbs
• Adjectives
• Measuring Success (Testing Requirements)
• Requirements Statements vs. Design Statements
• Turning Design Statements into Requirements

4. The Business Case

• Documenting the Business Case
• Building the Business Case
• Project Context
• Actors and External Entities
• The Context Diagram
• Mastering the Requirements Process

5. Stakeholder Requirements

• The People Side of Requirements
• Best Practices for Stakeholder Interactions
• Working with People
• Requirements Elicitation Techniques
• Identifying Stakeholder Requirements
• Facilitating a Requirements Discovery Session
• Structure of a Facilitated Session

6. Functional Requirements

• Functional Requirements
• Level of Detail for Functional Requirements
• So What Are Functions?
• Words to Avoid
• Where Can We Find Functional Requirements?
• Writing Functional Requirements from Stakeholder Requirements
• Writing Functional Requirements from a Use Case
• Use Case
• Writing into Functional Requirements from Artifacts

7. Non-Functional Requirements

• Reliability Requirement Statements
• Performance Efficiency Requirement Statements
• Operability & Usability Requirement Statement
• Security Requirement Statements
• Compatibility Requirement Statements
• Maintainability and Supportability Requirements
• Transferability and Portability
• Where Can We Find Quality of Service Requirements?
• Other Places to Look for Non-Functional Requirements
• Writing Non-Functional Requirements from Stakeholder Requirements
• Writing Non-Functional Requirements from Use Cases
• Writing Non-Functional Requirements from Functional Requirements
• Writing Non-Functional Requirements from Artifacts
• Transition Requirements

8. The Requirements Communication

• Purpose of Requirements Communication
• Requirement Document
• Levels of Requirements Communication
• Peer Review
• Stakeholder Walkthrough
• Requirements Inspection
• Sign-Off Approval
• The Requirements Baseline