Mastering the Requirements Process

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: 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.

Number of Days: 3 days

  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
    Planning on Requirements Work
    Dictionary of Terms

  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

  1. 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

  2. Functional RequirementsFunctional 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

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