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.

Objectives

Elicit and capture user’s requests and turn them into requirements.

Write high quality business, functional, and quality of service requirements.

Communicate, validate, and gain sign off on the requirements document.

Detailed 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
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
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