Eliciting and Writing Effective Requirements Training Overview
Successful projects are built on the foundation of clearly defined requirements. In contrast, projects often fail due to poor requirements practices. It is imperative that business analysts employ successful elicitation practices to overcome these challenges. This course teaches novice through seasoned business analysts the latest practices in elicitation and writing effective requirements.
Location and Pricing
Accelebrate offers instructor-led enterprise training for groups of 3 or more online or at your site. Most Accelebrate classes can be flexibly scheduled for your group, including delivery in half-day segments across a week or set of weeks. To receive a customized proposal and price quote for private corporate training on-site or online, please contact us.
In addition, some courses are available as live, instructor-led training from one of our partners.
Objectives
- Understand the role of the business analyst and the 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 best practices for eliciting each type
- Demonstrate their 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 more than 15 current and commonly applied elicitation techniques
- Understand how to progress from elicitation to analysis to documentation
- Write well-formed and valid requirements
- Gain an understanding of the best practices for writing quality requirements
- Learn the technical writing techniques that apply directly to writing requirements documents
- Discuss writing pitfalls and risks that impact requirements, and how to address them
- Learn best practices for communicating and collaborating with stakeholders, sharing the elicitation results and the resulting documentation
- Learn approaches for validating requirements
- Understand the difference between validating requirements and validating the solution
Prerequisites
All students should have taken Introduction to Business Analysis or have equivalent experience.
Outline
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Introduction
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®
- Business analysis core concepts
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
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
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
Conducting Requirements Elicitation
- Elicitation skillset
- Types of elicitation techniques
- Using active listening in elicitation
- Techniques for performing elicitation
- Benchmarking/Market Analysis
- 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
Writing 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
Confirming and Communicating 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
Evaluating the Solution
- Business analyst role in solution evaluation
- Why solutions underperform
- 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 the results of solution evaluation
Conclusion and Next Steps
- Useful books and links for writing effective requirements
- The BABOK®
- Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide
Training Materials
All Business Analysis training students receive comprehensive courseware.
Software Requirements
For in-person deliveries, attendees do not need computers for this course. We will provide full classroom setup instructions that will include seating in small groups, with supplies such as flipcharts, sticky notes, markers, and pens for the attendees and a projector and Internet connection for the instructor's laptop.
Online deliveries for this interactive training will use an online meeting platform (such as Zoom, WebEx, GoTo, or Teams) to have face-to-face contact online, including use of breakout rooms for group activities.
