The Quest for Good Requirements | 5
300 Brickstone Square • Suite 201 • Andover, MA 01810 USA • 1.800.288.7246 • +1.978.649.8200 • info@corpedgroup.com
Stakeholder Obligations
For an IT project to be successful, the stakeholders have certain responsibilities:
• Spend the time with the analyst and educate them about their business and help them
understand their objectives
• Allocate the time necessary to provide clear requirements and validate the requirements in a
timely fashion.
• Precisely describe their requirement; vaguely stated requirements are not implementable and
documenting them is a waste of time.
• Provide feedback when needed.
• Provide additional information in a timely fashion.
• Prioritize the requirements.
• Respect the estimates for time and budget provided by the project team and resist the urge to
"negotiate."
• Inform the project team of changes to requirements as soon as they occur.
The analyst must continually remind (in subtle ways, of course) the stakeholders of their responsibilities.
If the stakeholders don't live up to them, then that introduces project risks which must be made known
to the projects manager and included in the project's risk catalog.
Requirements Elicitation and Discovery
To discover requirements, the analyst applies a variety of techniques. The steps in requirements
elicitation are generally as follows:
• Plan the requirements elicitation process and how the team will document and validate the
requirements. This plan is referred to as the requirements management plan (RMP) and is
considered a key document for project planning.
• Write a project charter or project mission statement containing the business requirements
and the overall scope of the project. Often, a context diagram is provided to clarify the scope
of the system development effort. All stakeholders must agree to the vision for the project.
Some organizations refer to this document as the business requirements document (BRD). Use
brainstorming and interviewing to arrive at the key business requirements.
• Identify the key users and their usage characteristics and select a proxy for each user that can
present the requirements for that class of users. These "user representatives" will be consulted
throughout the requirements elicitation effort.
• Collaborate with the user representatives to identify use cases and then analyze those use cases
to derive the detailed functional requirements for the product.
• Analyze any events to which the system must respond, such as input from hardware devices or
messages from other systems.
• Identify any other stakeholders who might provide requirements or constraints.
• Convene requirements workshops in which users work together for a few days to explore user
needs and to agree on the requirements. Requirements workshops are a way to reduce the
amount of time it takes to find all the requirements by getting everyone together at the same
time. Joint Requirements Planning (JRP) and Joint Application Development (JAD) are examples
