At a glance
3 days
NZD $2390 + GST
Can also run in-house Australia or NZ
Effective Business Requirements
Overview
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 improve this situation, cut through the jargon, and understand how to remove many of these problems. The course focuses on understanding the processes involved in gathering and presenting business and system requirements, their interactions, and how to make them work in practice.
To enable this understanding, the course takes a “people” view of the requirements lifecycle process; who is involved, what they must achieve, and how we can make that happen.
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.
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 with requirements management, from both business and systems perspectives
- Recognise relationships (and differences) between requirements engineering and requirements management
- Use problem identification techniques for evaluating requirements
- Use decision analysis techniques for evaluating requirements and solution options.
Content
Introduction & Overview
- Recognising relationships (and differences) between requirements engineering and requirements management
- Lifecycles and approaches
- Capability Maturity Model (CMM)
- Standards for requirements engineering and management e.g. ISO, IEEE
- Quality control
Requirements Engineering
- Benefits of "good" requirements engineering
- Requirements engineering process
- Elicitation
- Analysis
- Documentation
- Validation
- What techniques to use and when to use them
- Identifying requirements
- Types of requirements
- Levels of requirements
- Writing "good" requirements
- Characteristics of requirements statements
- Producing the documentation
- Vision and Scope document
- System Requirements Specification
- Software Requirements Specification
- Supplementary Specification
- Defining the scope of the system
- Negotiation
Requirements Management
- Prioritising requirements
- Baselining requirements
- Requirements status
- Requirements attributes
- Traceability
- Impact analysis
- Attribute and traceability policies
- Tool support
- Defining the scope of the project
- Configuration management
- Managing changing requirements
Peer Reviews for Quality Assurance
- The benefits of reviews
- Different review types
- Participating in reviews
- The steps and activities involved in reviews
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
