Mastering the Requirements Process

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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