Effective Business Requirements

IIBA Endorsed Course

This course is endorsed by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA™). It provides material and skills relevant to three Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK™) knowledge areas.

Many of the problems encountered in business information systems implementations are the direct result of shortcomings in the processes and practices used to gather, understand, document, confirm and manage the requirements for the system.

This course is intended for those who want to enhance their current business analysis knowledge, cut through the jargon, and understanding how to remove many of these obstacles. The course focuses on teaching the participants some key techniques and methods of Requirements Engineering by highlighting the importance of the BA taking ownership of the requirements from generation through to validation and requirements management.

What's The Benefit?

Industry studies around the world suggest that five out of every six software projects fail or are "challenged" - over time and/or over budget. Three major factors appear consistently as reasons for this lack of success:

Poorly defined requirements
Poor management of changes to requirements
Insufficient customer or user involvement in defining and managing requirements.

If business analysts don't provide detailed business and software requirements, then the programmers will invent them. But the decisions that software developers make are often different from the decisions a subject matter expert would make under the same circumstances. Who should be defining your business: the people who work in it, or programmers?

There can be up to a 200:1 payoff in ensuring that requirements are defined completely, correctly, precisely, consistently, and unambiguously - and agreed by all stakeholders prior to system implementation - compared with waiting until the "maintenance" phase to get things right.

The techniques and tools conveyed in this course have been shown to result in time and cost savings of up to 50% and a return on investment of up to 1200% in real-world projects.

See how this course fits into your career path >>

Intended For

Business analysts, analysts/designers, project leaders, and project managers.

Prerequisites

Participants are expected to have an understanding of business analysis activities.

A suggested lead-in course is Software Education’s “Business Systems Analysis” course.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

Understand the objectives, processes and activities involved in defining testable requirements of different types
Understand how to negotiate and prioritise conflicting requirements
Understand how to define and use requirements quality metrics in the process of defining and evaluating requirements
Learn how to run a Peer Review session
Establish detailed traceability between Business Requirements and other project deliverables
Understand the importance of consistent use approved requirements templates
Ensure effective participation on projects by business Stakeholders and SMEs
Learn about the challenges and take away some tips for moving from requirements to design.

Content

Introduction & Overview

Lifecycle and Approaches
Recognising the relationships between business analysis and requirements engineering
Overview of Requirements Engineering
The Requirements Engineering Roadmap
Capability Maturity Model (CMM)
Standards for requirements engineering and management e.g. ISO, IEEE

Requirements Fundamentals

Identifying requirements
Types of requirements
Levels of requirements
Writing “good” requirements
Requirements Properties
Requirements Quality Attributes
Characteristics of requirements statements

Requirements Engineering Process

Elicitation and Documentation	Eliciting Requirements (various approaches with focus on eliciting Non-Functional Requirements) Producing the documentation Vision and Scope document System Requirements Specification Software Requirements Specification Supplementary Specification
Analysis and Negotiation	Analysis of Requirements against Quality Criteria Requirements Trade-offs Requirements Negotiation
Requirements Validation	Formal Validation Methods Requirements Quality Metrics V-Model Peer Reviews (benefits, types, participation, process of review)
Requirements Management	Prioritising requirements Baselining requirements Requirements status Requirements attributes Traceability Impact analysis Attribute and traceability policies Tool support Configuration management Managing changing requirements
How to make a transition from requirements to design	Major obstacles identified Approaches to overcome those identified obstacles

Method Used

The course is based on participation, group work, and discussion of the findings. There will be lecture sessions to formalise and confirm the findings. The participants undertake a case study through the course, building up to a final complete set of documentation and knowledge of the topic.

Business Analysis Body of Knowledge™

This course is endorsed by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA™), and provides material and skills relevant to the following Business Analysis Body of Knowledge™ (BABOK™) knowledge areas:

Requirements Planning and Management
Requirements Analysis and Documentation
Requirements Communication.

For more details on the IIBA™ and the BABOK™ see http://www.theiiba.org

Software Education Australia Pty Ltd
Freecall: 1800 145 152 Fax: 1800 145 715