Defining and Managing Business Requirements

Successful projects need 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 program teaches foundational business analysis skills and is the first program in our Business Analysis Certificate. In this program, you’ll practice defining problems, assessing their impact, and identifying and managing stakeholders’ expectations. You’ll learn how to discover and develop often overlooked requirements. You’ll discuss requirements elicitation, documentation, 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.

Course Pre-Work and Post-Work: The modules may consist of assessments, discussion forum exercises, videos, and/or reading assignments. Additionally, each module requires post-work application action planning, exercises, and/or self-reflection. Please allow two to three hours to complete these items each week.

How You Will Benefit

• Evaluate stakeholders to determine how they are best engaged in your projects
• Recognize the value of understanding the overall business problems before finding solutions to them
• Select the best elicitation technique based on stakeholders, context and desired outcome
• Create great questions to use during elicitation to get the information you need in an efficient and effective manner
• Design requirements, starting with business objectives, linking those to stakeholder requirements and then creating useful and clear requirements that document the solution
• Compare and contrast available solution options to assist business leaders in making the best decisions your organization
• Use cost benefit analysis to create a compelling business case for change

Curriculum

• Module 1 – Introduction to Defining and Managing Business Requirements
• Module 2 – Complexity in Business Analysis
• Module 3 – Requirements
• Module 4 – Elicitation Using Interviews and Workshops
• Module 5 – Elicitation Using Prototyping, Observation, and Research
• Module 6 – Stakeholder Management and Communication
• Module 7 – Decision Making and Analysis
• Module 8 – Analysis and Modeling