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| When was the company formed? |
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The Requirements Solutions Group (RSG) LLC is a joint venture created in 2004 between Hathaway & Associates Inc. formed in 1979 in Germany and Myers and Associates formed in the US in 1981. |
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| How many clients have received your requirements gathering training? |
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250-300 |
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| Are all of the recommended courses available for on-site training? |
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Yes, and also for web-based, live instructor delivery. In addition the 5 rules for writing an effective requirement are available in a web-based, self-paced format. |
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| Does your course material on business analysis/requirements gathering have PMI accreditation? |
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RSG courses qualify for PMI PDUs for both certification and recertification as described in the PMP Credential Handbook. See Certifications: http://www.pmi.org/Pages/Ten_Ways_to_Earn_PDUs.aspx for the handbooks. |
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| How long has the company worked in business analysis and requirements gathering? |
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We have focused solely in the requirements world for fourteen years. |
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| What are the trainers’ average years of actual experience in business analysis and requirements gathering? |
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We require 20 years of IT experience with at least 10 years in the Business/System Analysis world. In addition we require a minimum of 5 years of stand up presentation experience. Our current average is above these minimums. |
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| How many students have been trained in business requirements gathering by your company? |
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15,000-20,000 |
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| What is the lead time for scheduling on-site training? |
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With some flexibility on your part, 4-6 weeks. It can happen sooner depending on the course. |
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| Are your courses on business analysis/requirements gathering eligible for college credit or professional certification? |
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Professional Certification: We are an IIBA Endorsed Education Provider. Our courses are eligible for the 21 class hours required for the IIBA Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP). |
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| For what areas of IT project management besides requirements gathering do you provide training? |
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All of our training and consulting is requirements related. To that end, we also offer requirements-driven project planning and estimating and requirements-driven testing (user acceptance testing) |
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| What kind of improvement can we expect to see in project delivery as a result of taking this training? |
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We have a dynamic web site that will calculate the expected improvement based on defect reduction and/or post implementation maintenance costs due to errors in requirements. Defect reduction should be about 15-34%. Dollar impact is a function of your annual maintenance budget and the number of Business Analysts involved in the training. |
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| What would a company need to provide the trainer to host the courses on-site? Computer hardware? Internet Access? Software installation? |
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None of our courses require computers. They are all technique based. The hyper linked requirements definition document is internally self explanatory, or can be taught over the web. We need only an LCD projector, and 2-3 flip charts and pens, and importantly, coffee. |
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| When was the requirements gathering curriculum created? When was it last updated? How often is the content reviewed for accuracy and relevancy? |
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The original Curriculum was created as part of a full life cycle curriculum in 1985. The Business/System Analysis Curriculum was split out in 1991. We reassess our curriculum on an on-going basis to ensure that our topics are current and relevant. Neary every course is updated every two years at the outside. |
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| What are the trainers’ average years of experience in teaching business analysis and requirements gathering courses? |
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The minimum is 5 years. The current average is about 12 years. |
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| What is the cost structure for on-site training – minimum and maximum number of attendees, pricing levels. |
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There is no minimum. However, it takes about 6 participants to generate the kind of interaction we want. Our pricing is for up to 16 participants. Under acceptable circumstances we can stretch to 20, but the time spent with individual participants suffers. |
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| Is your course content original and free from vendor bias? |
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YES. Although the techniques we teach are vendor and tool independent, the right tool can enhance the speed and quality of the BA’s work. Therefore, we constantly research supporting tools. When we find tools that we think are best of breed, we recommend them to our client base. |
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| What is your ratio of training vs. consulting activity? |
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Our target is 50/50 of our billable time. However, during the last 5 years it has been closer to 65% training/35% consulting. During 1995-2000, it was about 30% training/70% consulting. We also set aside 25% of our time (about 30-40 days/year) for research and professional development. |
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| What percentage of time do the trainers spend in actual practice compared to leading training courses? |
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It varies by person but is usually about the same as our current average 65% training/35% consulting. |
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| How can we measure the improvement? |
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The link below uses industry norms to calculate low and high values based on a number of facts. The facts are described as part of the web page that will calculate your potential improvement.
In order to actually measure the impact you would ideally know how much you are currently spending on defect removal in development and maintenance due to errors made in the requirements. Most organizations do not gather this data. Thus, it has to be indirectly determined through processes such as we have used in the link. Other organizations have addressed this question and most of the answers come out about the same.
Please visit this link. You will need to know how many people will be involved in the training and the size of your annual maintenance budget or entire IT budget to use the calculator.
http://www.requirementssolutions.com/How_Much_Does_Business_Analysis_Training_Cost.html
Please read the FAQs and the numbers tab to understand how these calculations were created. |
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| How are your trainers screened, trained and evaluated? |
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Screening: The first screening is our experience requirement from #2 above. The second screening is that one of the managing partners (MPs) or specific subject trainer/consultant attends a course (or part of a course) that the candidate is teaching for someone else. The third screening is an interview by 2-3 current trainer/consultants.
Training: We do not train candidates in subject matter. Each candidate that passes the screening sits through 1-2 offerings of each course that they will teach. During the sit-through they create their own instructor's guide.
We review each instructor’s guide and randomly ask them to present sections to the managing partners and/or subject matter expert.
Evaluating: Our standard post-course reviews or our clients' reviews plus follow-up calls by the MPs at about 4 and 10 weeks. Every so often a MP will sit-in on a day for evaluation purposes.
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| What makes a good requirement |
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We have developed 5 rules for writing a requirement that is simple, non-ambiguous, understandable by a subject matter peer, and testable
Rule 1 Be Simple and Complete Sentences
Rule 2 Emphasize "What" not "How"
Rule 3 Be Relevant, Unambiguous, and Clear
Rule 4 Be Understood by Knowledge Peers
Rule 5 Be Objectively Measurable (Testable) |
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| What percentages of your requirements gathering training clients also use your consulting services to assist with requirements gathering? |
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About 20-30% |
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| Could the recommended courses be scheduled together? |
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Yes, however, at some point in time the participant will suffer brain fade. The exceptions to this problem are a "boot camp" approach in which the participants are fully and only dedicated to the training over the duration of a 5-8 day course spread across a weekend. |
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| How to record requirements |
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Although there are a number of good, commercial Requirements Management (RM) tools available, we teach and leave with you a web based (or Word based) hyper linked template that follows our course content on how to manage requirements. This template handles the fundamentals for most projects. For projects over 6,000 IT effort hours, large and multi-division projects we believe you need a commercial RM product. |
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| What level of customization is available for on-site training? Can the training be: |
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We use two terms, tailored and customized. Tailored means we will move modules, restructure courses, and change timings to emphasize or deemphasize certain topics at no charge. Customized means we will create specials material, use specific company examples or a case study and/or connect the course techniques to the company’s templates. |
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| How to capture/extract requirements from business partners |
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We can present up to 20 different techniques to elicit (capture, gather) requirements across 4 different courses. |
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| Linked to a company’s project management framework? |
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Yes. |
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| How to verify completeness and accuracy of the requirements |
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Accuracy is covered as part of the 5 rules in answer 5a. The reality of requirements definition is that they are never complete. However, we teach 5 techniques that approach analyzing and reviewing the requirements from different perspectives to uncover missing requirements. We also provide job aids to guide this process. This significantly reduces the missed requirements. |
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| Tailored to use actual company examples and templates? |
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It is hard to estimate this in advance, but our experience indicates that it takes about 6-10 hours per course day for custom exercises and about 2-6 hours to link into a Requirements Definition document or other template. If you already have "good" examples, or if we can work directly with a chosen few of your people to modify our examples, We can significantly reduce this time. |
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| How is the requirement gathering process different for business intelligence (BI) efforts compared to traditional process improvement efforts? |
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The fundamental difference is that BI requirements ask, "What do you need to know and how do you want it presented?" Or, how does the business think about and use data?
Process improvement projects ask, "What do you need to do and what business rules govern the processes involved." Also, because processes are dynamic, you also need to know about performance requirements such as frequency, urgency, accuracy, and other measurable qualities. |
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| How often and in what locations are the recommended courses offered offsite? |
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We don’t offer a lot of public ILT training. Instead, we offer a significant number of our virtual (web-based, live-instructor) training programs. When we do plan a public, it is because a client needed training for a small group, and we can use this as a foundation of attendance for a public offering. Or, one of the partners wants to go somewhere. You can see our current offerings at :
http://www.requirementssolutions.com/Business_Analyst_Training.html
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| What is the minimum and maximum class size for offsite training? |
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Minimum : ILT is 6, Virtual is 5
Maximum: ILT is 16, Virtual is 10 |
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| What is a business requirement? |
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A business requirement is a statement from the business perspective that specifies a behavior required by a technical solution. Getting them and understanding what they mean are the primary challenges facing business systems analysts in today’s business world. You can get an introduction to the topic in our webinar Business System Analysis in the 21st Century. |
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| What is the cost for offsite training courses? |
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Costs are per student. There is a 10% discount for 3 or more in the same program. |
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| In your opinion, what roles should attend the training? |
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Different Roles would attend different components of the training. |
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| Can you take a class on your schedule? |
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Yes, our training material is being made available as "self-paced" (also known as "on-demand") "knowledge nuggets". Our goal is to deliver the same quality training experience to you on your time as we offer to groups in our live and virtual classrooms. The absence of the instructor necessitates additional explanatory material, but we still attempt to follow our successful formula of intermingling interactive exercises and questionnaires in our stand-alone, web-based modules. As a result, the development of these "knowledge nuggets" is an on-going effort. We are releasing new modules as quickly as we can deliver them with the requisite quality. |
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| What is "Requirements Engineering"? |
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Requirements engineering is generally considered to encompass all activities of eliciting, specifying, analyzing, documenting and managing requirements. |
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| How can you become certified as a business analyst? |
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The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®) conveys the Certified Business Analysis Professional® (CBAP®) title. RSG is an IIBA® Endorsed Education Provider, and all of our core Business Analysts’ Courses are also endorsed. All of our courses are aligned with the current IIBA Body of Knowledge (IIBA BOK) version 1.6. We will continue to update our courses as the IIBA BOK changes. See the IIBA certification page at http://www.theiiba.org/content.asp?ContentId=551. Currently the IIBA offers the CBAP through testing only. The testing is mostly based on the BOK. |
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| What can you do if the course you want is not scheduled? |
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If you are interested in a class that is not currently scheduled, let us know. We schedule our training courses based on demand and the better informed we are about the demand, the better we are able to schedule. |
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| How can you take our classes? |
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The Requirements Solutions Group offers training in 3 modes:
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| What is the UML? |
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The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a set of diagrams and related syntax based on the world of "Object-Orientation" which deals heavily with real-time applications. |
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| What problem does business analysis solve? |
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According to the Standish Group’s 1994 and 1997 CHAOS reports, the most significant contributing factors to project failure could be traced directly to poor requirements understanding and definition.
In a recent Sequent Computer Systems Inc. study of about 500 IT managers the most frequently named cause of project failure was poorly defined and changing requirements.
A summary of other studies on the dominant reasons that projects fail indicates that the three most common failure points in developing, enhancing or changing business systems today are:
- Incomplete and/or incorrect business requirements and technical specifications
- Incomplete or ineffective testing (often due to poor requirements)
- Improperly managed projects (Either incompetent project management, or incomplete and incorrect requirements)
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| Can you schedule a training event at your site? |
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Yes, any of our offers can be held at your site. We have instructors available for training anywhere in the world. Request a quote for a detailed offer tailored to meet your specific needs. |
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| Can you schedule a virtual class for your organization? |
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Yes, all of our instructor-led offers are available either as live or virtual offers that can be scheduled for a group. Request a quote for a detailed offer that meets your specific needs. |
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| Does the IIBA offer the equivalent of PDU? |
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The IIBA equivalent of the Project Management Institute’s (PMI®) PDU® (Professional Development Units) is called the CDU. CDUs are based on hours of training or professional service and are applied toward certification or recertification for the CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Professional). (See also the FAQ on PDU, below) |
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| How do the virtual classrooms work? |
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We use WebEx®; to provide the presentation to your computer and a toll-free audio connection for the instructor-student interaction. This combination of web-based technology with a live instructor allows for the most interactive session we can possibly deliver. With or without technology, people still learn best by doing, not by listening, so our training is designed to be heavily exercise– and interaction–based. At the end of each day of virtual training, you receive an electronic version of all of the results achieved during the day to review and as a reference after the training. |
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| Can you get PDU for taking RSG courses? |
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The PMI's Project Management Professional certification PMP® is primarily for project managers.
RSG courses qualify for PMI PDUs for both certification and recertification as described at http://www.pmi.org/Pages/Ten_Ways_to_Earn_PDUs.aspx.
RSG courses fall under the 10th way to earn PDUs. |
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| Does the business expert have to understand the data model? |
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A data model expresses constraints that a technological solution will place on the business community. If the business experts can not identify the constraints on the model, they will have difficulty determining what it means to accept the constraints. At the very least, the business experts should be conversant with the concepts of cardinality, relationships and attribute assignment. We present these topics in our seminar How to Model, Analyze, and Improve Business Data. |
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| Why analyze a business area if the business experts already know what they want? |
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A large number of information technology projects start with a solution that "has to" be implemented. The solution may or may not be the right decision. Whereas it is in IT’s best interest to deliver the solution that the end-user wants, the better the analysis of the thought process behind the decision, the easier it is for them to deliver a working system. Without sufficient understanding, IT may be implementing a solution that will not work. |
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| How many types of requirements are there? |
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The IT industry not only does not agree on the number of requirement types, we can’t even agree on what to call those that we have! The most commonly accepted categorization of requirements is presumably "functional" versus "non-functional" requirements but even here, the definition of what falls into each category is not universally accepted. Our Requirements Taxonomy provides a printable recommendation that describes 18 business requirements and a complementary set of system specifications. These requirements categories form the basis of all of our training offers. |
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| What is the difference between "business process improvement" and "business process reengineering"? |
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Generally speaking, business process reengineering implies a radical, significant change to a business process to take advantage of emerging technology and solve identified business problems. Business process improvement is an evolutionary approach to achieving the same goal. Whichever approach works for you, the techniques we present in How to Model, Analyze, and Improve Business Processes gives you a complete set of techniques for identifying and solving process problems. |
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| What is the difference between a data model and an entity relationship diagram? |
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An Entity-Relationship diagram (ERD) is a model of the static structure of the things about which you need to store data. A data model, technically speaking, is a broader category that encompasses ERD's as well as several other conventions for creating diagrams of your data. The Entity-Relationship diagram, however, has become so widespread that the two terms are most often used interchangeably. Our workshop How to Model, Analyze, and Improve Business Data presents techniques for creating and using ERD's for identifying and defining business data requirements. |
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| What is business analysis? |
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Business systems analysis is the evolving discipline that deals with identifying your business information technology needs. It includes expressing these needs as business requirements, processes and rules (hereafter business requirements) that the business community and information professionals both interpret the same way. Business requirements serve as the basis for development, testing, deployment, and use of your future information systems. They are the starting point for lifecycle management and business driven development. In a nutshell, these are the critical success factors for delivering information technology that the business community needs and wants. |
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| What diagrams comprise the UML? |
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The Unified Modeling Language (UML) encompasses symbols for the many commonly used models: Object Diagrams, Class Diagrams, Use Case Diagrams, Activity Diagrams, Sequence Diagrams, Collaboration Diagrams, Component Diagrams, State Diagrams, and Deployment Diagrams. |
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| Do you have anything on unit, integration, and system testing? |
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Our seminar " How to Test an Application using Business Requirements" targets specifically system and user acceptance testing. Unit and Integration testing are commonly conducted by or in conjunction with Developers. |
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| What can I do if I do not have enough time to test? |
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If you do not have sufficient time to test, the first thing you need to do is communicate to your managers and anyone else who is involved what risks are being added to the project. Of course, reality will always prevail. If you don’ have and can’t get more time or resources, your only recourse will often be to test the high-risk components of the solution and deal with the errors in the rest when they show up in production. |
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| What is an equivalence class? |
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An equivalence class is any set of input data and conditions that execute a common set of business rules, modules, files, etc. Each test situation can be different, but if the result that you are evaluating is achievable with a variety of different test cases, those test cases form an equivalence class. You can test any single member of the class and evaluate the systems’ reaction to the entire class. We present how to identify and use equivalence classes in your testing in our workshop How to Test an Application using Business Requirements. |
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| What is a JAR/JAD? |
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A JAR/JAD (Joint Application Development — Requirements — or Joint Application Requirements Definition) is a time-compression workshop that focuses on quickly capturing, clarifying and confirming business requirements (and, later, system specifications) for an information technology solution. It is attended by a cross-functional group consisting of subject matter experts, business / systems analysts, systems designers and project leaders. Our training session How to Prepare and Facilitate Productive JRP/JAD Sessions introduces participants to tools, techniques and tricks for facilitating and supporting these workshops. |
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| We have scheduled a JAR/JAD session. How can I prepare myself? |
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Effective preparation for a JAR/JAD session requires that you know and understand the goal of the JAR/JAD session (what will the session produce) and how the deliverables will be created (tools or techniques). If you do not have access to this information, contact the project leader or JAR/JAD facilitator and ask for help. He/she should be able to recommend training or presentations that will help you prepare yourself. The most effective participants are those who know what to expect and feel confident in their ability to deliver. |
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| Who should attend a JAR/JAD session? |
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The four critical categories of JAR/JAD session attendees are the facilitation team, technical experts, contributors and observers. The facilitation team has to lead the session and produce the deliverables based on the input from the "contributors". The "technical experts" pose pertinent questions and have to use the deliverables to do their job once the session is complete. "Observers" are present to study the process and potentially to learn about the topic under discussion but have no active role in the discussion. |
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| Who has to be involved in a pre-session? |
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The purpose of a pre-session is to evaluate the project and determine whether a JAR/JAD session is the appropriate approach for creating deliverables within the project environment. Typically, the people who have to be involved in making this determination are the project leader, IT management, client management, business analysts and/or system analysts, and the proposed facilitation team. This group may need input from other project participants or peers to be confident that their decision is right for all involved. |
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| Can I schedule a virtual class for classroom delivery? |
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You can schedule our virtual classes for in-house, instructor-led classroom delivery. Since our virtual modules are generally 3.5 — 7 hours in length, you might want to combine several modules to create a 2 — 3 day course to decrease the impact of instructor travel expenses. |
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