Defining and Managing Business Requirements
Avoid Project Failure through Successful Requirements Gathering
Successful projects are highly dependent on well-defined and well-understood requirements. This includes business requirements, product requirements and specifications. Investments in requirements processes have proven to be key contributors to delivering projects on time and on budget, with the required product functions and features that meet or exceed business requirements. Poor business analysis processes and inadequate requirements management processes have been identified as a leading cause of project failure. Organizations attempt to deal with this problem by using different approaches in discovering and defining requirements. However, requirements activities as employed in many organizations today are unstructured, ineffective, or simply performed incorrectly.
This course focuses on a requirements management process that contributes to project success. Using a real case for a workshop exercise, you will practice defining the real problem, assessing the impact on the business, and identifying and managing stakeholders’ expectations. We will practice using various elicitation tools and techniques to discover real requirements that contribute to deliverable solutions, solutions that produce desired business outcomes. You will learn how to develop itemized deliverable lists and how to discover overlooked requirements. We will discuss requirements verification, traceability, and change management. Finally, you will realize how to prioritize and select the best requirements solutions and present those solutions in a business case format.
You'll learn how to:
- Utilize an enterprise requirements management processes and improve project success
- Use a Plan-Build-Test-Deploy requirements management model
- Identify project stakeholders, and discover and define their real problems
- Realize and uncover real requirements using various methods and tools
- Create great questions to ask in surveys, interviews, shadowing users, and JAD
- Discover functional requirements that deliver value to business requirements
- Document requirements clearly using standard formats and use cases
- 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 analysis of requirements solution(s) for benefits realization
- Prioritize, select and present the best requirements solutions to problems/opportunities
- Transfer a practical requirements management methodology back to your workplace
Note: This course may be taken as part of the Masters Certificate in Project Management. It will substitute for the “Negotiating and Contracting with Project Service Providers” course.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison, as a member of the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA), authorizes this course for 2.2 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) or 22 hours, as well as 22 PDUs.
pfriede@exed.wisc.edu