Critical Skills for Writing Better Requirements

Our failure to understand users’ requirements is the most common source of project defects, delays and cancellations. The accumulating evidence is unequivocal: most serious problems associated with projects are related directly to requirements. Critical Skills for Writing Better Requirements attacks the problem of project failures by addressing their root causes: incomplete, poorly defined, and/or changing requirements.

This two-day course will give you hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques for gathering requirements. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises will provide you with the competence and confidence to improve project outcomes through better requirements elicitation. You’ll gain a thorough understanding of the challenges faced in defining correct requirements, practical approaches for eliciting and documenting requirements, and strategies for managing requirements throughout the project life cycle. If you participate in defining project scope, capturing requirements, or managing project scope, you can’t afford to miss this course!

Please note, there is a $500 fee to claim your St. Louis University Certification upon completion of the requirements.

1. Improve tools and techniques for gathering and developing more precise requirements
2. Increase customers’ satisfaction by determining and understanding their true needs
3. Prevent errors in specifications by defining project scope up front
4. Identify the key players and learn to communicate effectively with them
5. Learn how to collect and use metrics so you can plan better
6. Lower development/maintenance costs by designing cost-effective processes
7. Understand how to plan and manage the software development life cycle more effectively
8. Develop templates and checklists that work
9. Save money by reducing and managing ever-present scope creep
10. Improve business analysis techniques to reduce project cost

Who Should Attend:
This writing business requirements training course is valuable for all those involved in managing and defining projects.

This seminar is for you if you are a:

• Business Customer or Partner who wants to work more effectively with IT colleagues to identify project requirements for solving business problems
• Business Analyst who needs to define or gather users' business requirements
• Business Systems Analyst who wants to understand user's business requirements, translate them into clear statements of functional and system requirements and add value to IT projects
• Systems Analyst who must develop correct technical specifications from functional and system requirements
• Designer or Developer who desires to produce a high-quality system from the functional and systems requirements
• Project Manager or Team Leader who must ensure that IT project team members correctly understand customer needs and deliver high quality solutions within project constraints

Course Outline:

I. The Business Case for Requirements Engineering

Projects have high failure rates, and evidence points to problems with defining requirements as one primary cause. This section presents an overview of the challenges inherent in projects in general, and specific problems typically encountered with project requirements.

II. Foundations of Requirements Development

Developing requirements is key to project success. In this section, we’ll cover some basic definitions, review a requirements development framework and process, and introduce an example system we’ll use for our practice sessions.

III. Project Initiation

Projects arise in part to solve business problems, and understanding the underlying problem or problems is therefore key to being able to identify the correct requirements. During this section, you will refresh your knowledge of and practice defining and documenting project scope and key business requirements.

IV. Eliciting Functional and Non-functional Requirements

As we come to understand the business problem at the heart of a project, we need to learn to capture our business customers’ functional and non-functional requirements. This section explores several powerful and effective analysis techniques for requirements elicitation and development.

V. Use Cases: A First Look

A”use case” is a sequence of events performed by an actor (person, automated system, or both) in a business environment to get their job done. Use cases carry significant requirements for a system from the perspective of a business user. Use cases are a critical tool in the analysis process, helping us understand what the system needs to do. Later in the development life cycle, use cases aid in design and implementation, testing, and user documentation for the new system. This section introduces the concept of use cases and gives you an opportunity to explore this analysis technique.

VI. Reviewing and Refining Requirements

Well-defined requirements are critical to producing a system that meets the needs of the project stakeholders. Finding the requirements is only the first challenge. Once discovered, requirements must be reviewed, analyzed, validated and possibly rewritten. All requirements must then be confirmed with project stakeholders before the final specification is published.

VII. Creating a Requirements Specification

“The job’s not finished ‘til the paperwork’s done.” The final deliverable for many projects is a Requirements Specification of some kind. Writing a clear, concise and informative specification is a critical step in providing the implementation team with the information they need to design and implement a solution that is right for the stakeholders of the project. This section focuses on the creation and communication of the final requirements specification.