Discover Requirements for IT - Simply Put!
What you'll learn
- Identify potential stakeholders early in the project
- Manage the requirements elicitation process with a Question File
- Recognize, track, and report progress toward requirements completion
- Define, document, and analyze business problems to ferret out hidden requirements
- Facilitate effective requirements brainstorming sessions to uncover additional requirements
- Use 10 critical questions to initiate the requirements elicitation process
- Capture and communicate assumptions about your requirements
- Avoid “analysis paralysis” by recognizing when it is time to stop eliciting and start deciding
Requirements
- There are no prerequisites for this course. You will get the most benefit, however, if you also take our related course "Requirements Interviews and Workshops Simply Put!"
Description
7 Ways to Kick Start IT Development
Getting the right business and stakeholder requirements for software development is arguably the most challenging step in software development. Nearly every study over the past 40 years has pinpointed missing and misunderstood IT requirements as the primary cause of IT project failures and overruns. Agile Software Development approaches have significantly increased the potential for project success but even Agile projects suffers from 30% - 40% failure rates. The importance of early discovery and capture of initial visions, business and stakeholder requirements, features, or User Stories cannot be overstated. The requirements you identify, discover, elicit, or gather are the foundation for the remainder of the work on the product or project.
The problem is that the project stakeholders are not entirely sure what they need the IT application to deliver. They have ideas and often discuss problems and opportunities, but are not trained to express those in the form of actionable requirements. This course presents 7 requirements elicitation techniques for getting IT requirements from product stakeholders. The authors have used these techniques on hundreds of IT projects around the globe and know the value each provides. Every presented technique will greatly improve your ability to elicit effective features and/or requirements (which is the ultimate challenge).
In this course, you will learn how to help the business community discover business needs that form the basis for Product Requirements Documents, Product Backlogs, or Feature Lists. It presents specific business analysis techniques for identifying stakeholders, analyzing relevant business problems, helping stakeholders discover what they don't know they need (but still want the solution to deliver), and a set of key questions you need to answer to initiate and manage the process. Applying these techniques will significantly improve your initial Product Backlog, Feature List, or Product Requirements Document and increase the probability of a successful project.
We design our courses with a mix of “talking-head” instructor videos augmented with “Intellimated” visual aids proven to improve comprehension and increase retention.
Who this course is for:
- Subject Matter Experts (SME)
- Product Managers
- Business-Side Teams supporting Agile Software Development
- Project Leaders and Managers
- Business Analysts
- Business Architects
- Systems Analysts
- Customer-Side Teams
- User liaison personnel
- AND “anyone wearing the business analysis hat”, meaning anyone responsible for defining what a project should deliver will benefit from this class. Although it is directed toward Information Technology projects, all of the techniques will benefit you on any project, professional or personal.
Course content
- Preview06:15
Instructor
![Tom and Angela Hathaway](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64"%3E%3C/svg%3E){kind=avatar}
- 4.3 Instructor Rating
- 5,256 Reviews
- 43,176 Students
- 12 Courses
Angela and Tom Hathaway of BA-EXPERTS (previously Hathaway & Associates, Inc. and Requirements Solutions Group, LLC) have been in business analysis and UX (User Experience) design for over 30 years. Their expertise spans information technology, methodologies, and innumerable applications in every industry for organizations from Mom-and-Pop shops to Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. In their writings and lectures they strive for enlightening while entertaining.
They have taught many thousands of students around the world and facilitated hundreds of requirements discovery sessions under a variety of acronyms (JAD, ASAP, JADr, JRP, etc). In recent years, they have focused their attention on human-machine communication, in particular how to improve the use of Chatbots.
Current and past customers include TIAA-CREF (Financial), Cathay Pacific, Emirates Airlines (Transportation), Manitoba Telecom Services (Telecommunications), Honeywell (Manufacturing), Starwood Hotels and Resorts (Hospitality), numerous government agencies, and a myriad of other organizations.
Tom and Angela's training, consulting, and mentoring efforts have saved their customers around the world millions of dollars. They can help your organization evolve and improve your conversational user interface, business analysis, and UX Design practices.