Writing Requirements for IT — Simply Put!
What you'll learn
- Write requirements that focus on the business need
- Test the relevance of each requirement to ensure that it is in scope for your project
- Create and maintain a question file to reduce the impact of incorrect assumptions
- Minimize the risk of scope creep caused by missed requirements
- Confirm that each audience shares a common understanding of the requirements
- Use our Peer Perception technique to find ambiguous words and phrases that can lead to misunderstandings
- Apply 3 simple rules to create technology-independent, component-focused requirements
- Reduce the ambiguity of a statement by adding context and using standard terms and phrases
Requirements
- No technical background required
- Need or desire to define user requirements, features, user stories, etc.
- Interest in finding more efficient ways to communicate business needs to the development community
- HTML5 compatible browser for exercises
- No additional materials are required
Description
Effective Requirements Reduce Project Failures
Writing requirements is one of the core competencies for anyone in an organization responsible for defining future Information Technology (IT) applications. However, nearly every independently executed root-cause analysis of IT project problems and failures in the past half-century have identified "misunderstood or incomplete requirements" as the primary cause. This has made writing requirements the bane of many projects.
The real problem is the subtle differences between "understanding" someone else’s requirement and "sharing a common understanding" with the author.
"Writing Requirements for IT — Simply Put!" gives you a set of 4 simple rules that will make your requirement statements more easily understood by all target audiences. The focus is to increase the "common understanding" between the author of a requirement and the solution providers (e.g., in-house or outsourced IT designers, developers, analysts, and vendors).
The rules we present in this book will reduce the failure rate of projects suffering from poor requirements. Regardless of your job title or role, if you are tasked with communicating your future needs to others, this course is for you.
How to Get the Most Out of this Course?
To maximize the learning effect, you will have optional, online exercises to assess your understanding of each presented technique. Lessons prefaced with the phrase “Exercise” contain an exercise that we have prepared to give you an opportunity to try the presented technique yourself.
These exercises are optional and they do not “test” your knowledge in the conventional sense. Their purpose is to demonstrate the use of the technique more real-life than our explanations can supply. We hope you enjoy them and that they make it easier for you to apply the techniques in real life.
Who this course is for:
- Subject Matter Experts
- Product Owners
- Business Process Managers
- Business Process Users
- Product and Project Managers
- Line Managers
- Business Analysts
- Anyone wearing the Business Analysis (BA) hat!
Course content
- Preview02:45
- Preview03:22
- Preview08:18
- 1 questionPart 1 - The Subjectivity of Language
- 1 questionPart 2 - The Subjectivity of Language
- 03:12The "Real" Problem with Requirements
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
- 43,184 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.