How to Gather and Document User Requirements

Master analysing and documenting requirements, to fulfil the vision and scope of any project.

Course Overview

Incomplete requirements are often cited as the number-one reason projects or systems fail, and accurately defining the requirements and staying on course from the beginning is critical to success in our current environment. This practical course introduces the ‘Business Analysis Success Model’ and how it relates to the role of the business analyst in the analysis and documentation of requirements and the documentation of the solution’s vision and scope. It familiarises participants with core knowledge and skills required to analyse and document user requirements and identifies how these requirements are defined and managed throughout the project life-cycle.

Course Topics

1. Roles, Definitions and Key Principles
   1. Critical role of the business analyst
   2. Creating and adopting a formal documentation strategy
   3. Key requirements documents
   4. Roles and mutual expectations among team members
2. Types of Requirements
   1. Attributed and other types of effective requirements
   2. What is an effective requirement?
3. Vision, Scope and Quality
   1. Defining problem, vision and scope
   2. Importance of a solution’s scope statement
   3. Documenting project vision and scope
   4. Including quality measures
   5. Managing change
4. Introduction to Modelling
   1. Documenting and tracking business rules
   2. Why use models?
   3. Modelling techniques
5. Creating a Requirements Work Plan
   1. The value of planning
   2. Elements of a requirements work plan
   3. Planning the analysis
   4. Identifying business analysis tasks
   5. Stakeholder identification and prioritisation
   6. User identification and profiling
6. Elicitation Techniques
   1. Dealing with barriers to elicitation
   2. Elicitation strategy
   3. Elicitation techniques
   4. Advantages and challenges of elicitation techniques
7. Documenting Requirements
   1. The purpose of documenting requirements
   2. Elements of a business requirements document
   3. Technical writing guidelines
   4. Requirements analysis
   5. The role of modelling in requirements documentation
   6. Use case and activity diagrams
   7. Presenting requirements
8. Managing Consensus
   1. Communicating effectively
   2. Effective consensus building
9. Validating Requirements
   1. Validation techniques
   2. Decision making and approvals
   3. Managing change and risk post-validation
   4. What happens next?