How to Write Effective, Understandable Business Requirement Statements

Workshop: How to Gather, Analyze, and Define Business System Requirements

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Overview

Written business requirements define an acceptable information technology system from the subject matter expert’s (SME’s) perspective. Poorly written requirements are the number one cause of IT project failure. Improving you ability to write clear concise, and comprehensive business requirements for IT solutions is the quickest way to get the systems your business needs. This workshop provides a proven set of core techniques, methods and tricks to help business professionals create and clarify business requirements (i.e., meaning the kind of requirements that the IT professionals need to do their job well).

Outline

  • A Problem with Language
  • Write a "Good" Requirement Sentence
  • Do’s
      Ex: What’s good about these requirements?
      Ex: How would you make them better?
  • Don’ts
      Ex: What’s bad about these requirements?
      Ex: How would you fix them?
  • Making a good requirement better
  • Peer Reviews Clarify Requirements
  • Rewriting and Posting Your Requirements for Review


Objectives
  • Write "good" business requirements
  • Distinguish between business requirements and system requirements (specifications)
  • Categorize requirements based on focus
  • Identify and document business rules as requirements
  • Write business requirements that express the what and avoid the how
  • Use templates to guide writing requirements
  • Reduce the number of wrong assumptions by using a question file

 

Our vision of a virtual workshop is web-based training that is highly interactive. We absolutely avoid the death by page-turning and the passive learning approach that is highly prevalent in most web-based training.

3.5 hours

Target Audience

Business Process Managers
Business Process Users
Business Subject Matter Experts
Business System Analysts
User liaison personnel
An intact project team who will work together to define the requirements for a specific project
Anyone who would like to understand their customer’s needs before they develop the solution