Eliciting and Writing Effective Requirements (BA04)
You will revisit the foundational concepts of business analysis and discuss the importance of requirements to project success. A deep exploration of requirements and requirements categories is provided. You will learn how to perform a deep exploration of your stakeholders as a starting point to the requirements process. You will be presented with guidance and helpful instruction for planning and preparing for elicitation and documentation. A number of popular and common elicitation techniques are explored. The best practices for writing and documenting requirements are shared. A thorough presentation of requirements and solution validation is provided.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the role of the business analyst and core competencies for performing successfully
- Discuss the criticality of business analysis and requirements for successful project outcomes
- Understand the main professional associations and standards supporting business analysts in the industry
- Discuss the common problems with requirements and explore approaches to address these issues
- Obtain a clear understanding of the various requirements types and the significance for eliciting each type
- Demonstrate your ability to identify stakeholders
- Explore various methods for understanding and analyzing stakeholders
- Discuss and apply good planning practices to requirements elicitation efforts
- Obtain knowledge and understanding of over 15 current and commonly applied elicitation techniques
- Understand how to progress from elicitation to analysis to documentation
- Write well-formed and validated requirements
- Gain understanding of the best practices for writing quality requirements
- Learn the technical writing techniques that apply directly to writing requirements documents
- Discuss writing pitfalls, risks that impact requirements, and how to address them
- Learn best practices for communicating and collaborating with stakeholders, sharing the results of elicitation and the resulting documentation
- Learn approaches for validating requirements
- Understand the difference between validating requirements and validating the solution
Intended Audience: This course is intended for beginner to intermediate business and requirements analysts who are looking to improve their elicitation and requirements writing and documentation skills. This course is also a great fit for technical writers, product and software testers, project managers, product owners who work closely with business analysts or who perform some for of business analysis themselves.
Prerequisites:
No prerequisites - This course is suitable for both novice and experienced practitioners who desire to improve their skills at eliciting and writing effective requirements. It is recommended that participants complete the BA01 – Business Analysis Essentials course prior to enrolling or have equivalent experience.
Course Outline:
Day 1 – Agenda
Module 1: Review of Foundational Concepts
- Definition of a business analysis
- Definition of business analyst
- BA role vs. PM role
- Business analysis competencies
- Benefits of business analysis
- Purpose for having a BA standard
- IIBA’s BABOK® Guide and PMI’s Practice Guide in Business Analysis
- Business analysis core concepts
- Discussion:
- Project challenges
Module 2: Understanding Requirements
- Common problems with requirements
- Understand the problem first
- Define the business need
- Situation statements and moving to requirements
- Understanding requirement types
- Business requirements
- Stakeholder/User Requirements
- Solution Requirements
- Functional Requirements
- Non-Functional Requirements
- Assumptions and Constraints
- Discussions:
- Requirement Problems
- Business Needs
- Workshop:
- Identifying Non-Functional Requirements
Section 3: Discovering Stakeholders
- Definition of a stakeholder
- Stakeholder types
- Identifying stakeholders
- Performing stakeholder analysis
- Stakeholders and requirements
- Tips for identifying stakeholders
- Grouping stakeholders
- Creating a RACI model
- Tips for analyzing stakeholders
- Documenting results of stakeholder analysis
- Workshop
- Discovering stakeholders
Module 4: Preparing for Requirements Elicitation
- Planning for elicitation
- Benefits of elicitation planning
- What do you plan?
- The elicitation plan
- Setting objectives for elicitation
- Determining the scope for elicitation
- Establishing pre-work
- Determining the outputs for the session
- The iterative nature of elicitation
- Elicitation roles
- Elicitation planning techniques
- Discussions:
- Who to involve in elicitation
- Planning Impacts
- Unplanned elicitation
- Workshop
- Planning for elicitation
Day 2 – Agenda
Module 5: Conduct Requirements Elicitation
- Elicitation skillset
- Types of elicitation techniques
- Using active listening in elicitation
- Techniques for performing elicitation
- Benchmarking/Market Analysis
- Brainstorming
- Business Rules Analysis
- Collaborative Games
- Concept Modeling
- Data Mining
- Data Modeling
- Document Analysis
- Focus Groups
- Interface Analysis
- Interviews
- Observation
- Process Modeling
- Prototyping
- Survey or Questionnaire
- Workshops
Module 6: Write Effective Requirements
- Elicitation and Analysis
- Requirements related issues
- Implications of bad requirements
- Elicitation and documentation
- Writing skillset
- Documenting requirements
- Modeling requirements
- Defining the project life cycle
- Impact of project life cycle on documentation
- Requirements specifications
- Characteristics of good requirements
- Guidelines for writing textual requirements
- Structuring a requirement
- Writing pitfalls
- Traceability
- Requirements attributes
- Risks associated to requirements
- Discussions:
- Project Life Cycle
- Correcting Poorly Written Requirements
- Workshops:
- Documenting Requirements
- Identify Characteristics of Good Requirements
Day 3 – Agenda
Section 7: Confirm and Communicate Elicitation Requirements
- Business analysis communication
- Requirements communication
- Communication skills
- The 7 Cs
- Timing of communication
- Planning communication
- Importance of Collaboration
- Planning collaboration
- Documenting communication/collaboration needs
- Confirming elicitation results
- Verify requirements
- Characteristics of good requirements (revisited)
- Requirements checklist
- Requirements validation
- Signing off on requirements
- Discussions:
- Responsibility for Communication
- Eliciting Communication Needs
- Validation
- Signoff
- Workshops
- Communicating Requirements
- Obtaining Signoff
Section 8: Evaluate the Solution
- Business analyst role in solution evaluation
- Why solutions under perform
- What we are looking for in solution evaluation
- When does solution evaluation occur
- Performing solution evaluation
- Planning solution evaluation
- Metrics that might exist
- Evaluating long term performance
- Qualitative vs. quantitative measures
- Tools & techniques used in solution evaluation
- Comparing expected to actuals
- When solution evaluation discovers a variance
- Tools/techniques for analyzing variances
- Proposing a recommendation
- Communicating results of solution evaluation
- Discussion:
- Addressing Variance
Section 9: Wrap up and Next Steps
- Useful books and links on writing effective requirements
- BABOK® Guide
- Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide
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