LinkedIn 
EmailEliciting and Documenting Requirements
- Traditional Classroom: 2-day
- Virtual Instructor-led: Four 3-hour sessions
A critical success factor to perform business analysis is the ability to elicit requirements from the perspective of business need and effectively communicate the requirements to stakeholders. This means that a business analyst must have excellent communication skills and have the ability to use techniques that make elicitation and communication of requirements most effective.
This workshop serves to provide business analysts with an understanding of facilitation best practices for planning/preparing, conducting, and performing follow-up for facilitation sessions in order to elicit or validate requirements.
The format of the workshop will be interactive and collaborative. It will serve to provide hands-on workshop discussions/exercises to ensure a sound understanding of how to effectively:
- Prepare for and plan a facilitated session to ensure that it runs smoothly and that the goals are met.
- Orchestrate and conduct a requirements facilitation session as a proficient BA facilitator.
- Deal with participant behavior during facilitated sessions.
- Employ techniques to encourage participation, gain consensus, and keep the session moving forward.
- Employ techniques/models to guide the elicitation and validation of the requirements.
Writing effective requirements is one of the biggest challenges that a business analyst faces. They must be correct, complete, unambiguous, and testable, to name some of the key characteristics of a “good” requirement statement.
The format of this workshop is interactive and collaborative. It will serve to provide hands-on workshop discussions/exercises to ensure a sound understanding of what the different types of requirements are, how to identify requirements, what the characteristics of effective requirements are, and how to write them so that they are clear, complete, concise, unambiguous, and, most importantly, testable. Requirements statements will be written based upon a case study and reviewed/critiqued by participants as a means of understanding how challenging requirements specification can be. Real-world examples will be provided along with guidelines for how to better ensure that your requirements are well written.
Target Audience
Individuals who will benefit from this workshop include business analysts and project managers.
Prerequisites
BAV311: Core Competencies for the Business Analyst
Learning Objectives
- Understand the different classifications of requirements.
- Provide tools, tips, and techniques to plan for and conduct effective requirements elicitation sessions.
- Provide tips for handling difficult stakeholders.
- Describe what BA soft skills are critical for success.
- Practice identifying what makes requirement statements “poor” vs. “great.”
- Learn how to leverage a use case/user story as the basis for eliciting requirements.
- Learn how to write great requirements to ensure that they are clear, unambiguous, and testable.
- Understand the components of the “packaged” requirements deliverable.
- Leverage requirements artifacts for solution actualization.
Course Outline
Module 1: Understanding Requirements
- Requirements Introduction
- Business Requirements
- Stakeholder Requirements
- Solution Requirements: Functional
- Business Rules
- Solution Requirements: Non-Functional
- Transition Requirements
Module 2: Requirements Management
- Requirements Prioritization
- Requirements Traceability
- Requirements Change Control
Module 3: Requirements Elicitation — Stakeholder Analysis
- Stakeholder Requirements
- Solution Requirements: Functional
Module 4: Requirements Elicitation Techniques
- Document Analysis
- Interviewing
- Requirements Workshop
- Observation
- Supplemental Activities
Module 5: Requirements Elicitation Best Practices
- Communication Topics
- Emotional Intelligence
- Decision Making — Ladder of Influence
- The Art of Powerful Questions
- Good Conversations — Meaningful Dialogue
Module 6: Requirements Validation
- Validation and Signoff
- Requirements Change Control
- Requirements Traceability Matrix for Impact Analysis
Module 7: Packaging the Requirements Deliverable
- Working Documents to Requirements Deliverable Package
- Document Content and Format Organization
Module 8: Actualize the Solution
- User Acceptance Testing
- Business Readiness/Transition Requirements
- Measuring Results
Module 9: Requirements for Acquiring Vendor Solutions
- Vendor Requirements Consideration
Module 10: BA Discipline Workshop
BAI304-5D Course Code
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