Defining and Managing Business Requirements

Successful projects depend on well-defined and well-understood requirements, including business requirements, product requirements, and specifications. Through effective requirements gathering, you can create the conditions necessary for your projects to succeed.

This course teaches a requirements management process. It is the foundation course in our Business Analysis series. In the course you’ll practice defining problems, assessing their impact, and identifying and managing stakeholders’ expectations. You’ll learn how to develop itemized deliverable lists and how to discover overlooked requirements. You’ll discuss requirements verification, traceability, and change management. Finally, you’ll understand how to prioritize and select the best requirements solutions and present those solutions in a business case format.

How You Will Benefit

• Identify project stakeholders and discover and define their real problems
• Realize and uncover real requirements using new methods and tools
• Create great questions to ask in surveys, interviews, and focus groups
• Practice different requirements-documentation techniques
• Analyze, verify, and validate requirements
• Refine, manage, and control changes to requirements
• Use a hierarchical solution selection process to build a foundation for future requirements
• Conduct financial analyses of requirements solutions for benefits realization
• Prioritize, select, and present the best requirements solutions to problems and opportunities

Agenda

Day 1 - Roles, Methods, and Elements of a Requirement Statement

• Business Analysis and Project Management Interrelationships
• The role of the IIBA
• Types of requirements and attributes of a good requirements statement
• Not all stakeholders are equal: stakeholder identification, analysis, and prioritization
• Communicating business need through SWOT, gap analysis, and problem statements
• Introduction to requirements elicitation and interviewing techniques

Day 2 - Technical, Functional, and Nonfunctional Requirements

• Advanced elicitation techniques including Kano model categorization
• Creating great questions for interviews and listening for real requirements
• Using process maps to distinguish presumed processes from real processes
• Documenting, validating, and writing clear requirements
• Using traceability techniques and tools
• Managing changes in the refining requirements phase
• Implementing a requirements change management process that manages stakeholders
• Developing a plan for user acceptance involvement

Day 3 - Using a Solution-Purpose Hierarchy

• Using decision matrices
• Identifying tangible and intangible benefits for each solution
• Assessing options from an organization perspective
• Developing requirements solutions for the business case and presenting solutions
• Planning for deliverable deployment and adapting the changes

Schedule

Day 1 - Includes breakfast, lunch, breaks and dinner

• Check-In and Breakfast 7:30 a.m. - 8:15 a.m.
• Course 8:15 a.m. - 5 p.m.
• Dinner 4:30 p.m. - 10 p.m.

Day 2- Includes breakfast, lunch and breaks

• Breakfast 7:30 a.m. - 8:15 a.m.
• Course 8:15 a.m. - 3:15 p.m.
• Dinner 4:30–10 p.m.

Day 3 – Includes breakfast, lunch, and breaks

• Breakfast 7:30–8:15 a.m.
• Course 8:15 a.m.–5 p.m.
• Dinner 4:30–10 p.m.