Requirements Gathering

The challenge

• The number reason projects fail because from the outset, what people wanted was not clear.
• Without proper due diligence, IT will deliver projects that fail to meet business expectations and fail to provide business value.
• If you failed to accurately capture the needs and desires, your projects are set up for costly rework. That will hurt your business's financial performance and result in damage to your relationship with your business partners.
• Even with requirements gathering processes in place, your business analysts may not have the required competencies to execute them.

Our advice

Insight

• You need to gather requirements with your organizations' end-state in mind. That requires IT and business alignment.
• You would be good to create a set of standard operating procedures around requirements gathering. But many companies fail to do so.
• Bring standardization and conformity to your requirements gathering processes via a centralized center of excellence. That brings cohesion and uniformity to your practice.
• It is critical that your business analysts have the necessary competencies to execute your processes and that they ask the right questions.

Impact and results 

• Better requirements analysis will result in shorter cycle timed and reduced project rework and overhead.
• You will enjoy better relationships with your business partners, greater stakeholder satisfaction, and gradually a better standing of IT.
• Most importantly, the applications and systems you deliver will contain all must-haves and some nice-to-haves. Your minimal viable deliverable will start to create business value immediately.

The roadmap

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

Get started.

Read our executive brief to understand why you should invest in optimizing requirements gathering in your company. We show you how we can support you.

• Improve Requirements Gathering – Executive Brief (ppt)

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• Improve Requirements Gathering – Phases 1-4 (ppt)

Build the target state

Fully understand the target needs of the requirements gathering process.

• Build a Strong Approach to Business Requirements Gathering – Phase 1: Build the Target State for the Requirements Gathering Process (ppt)
• Requirements Gathering SOP and BA Playbook (doc)
• Requirements Gathering Maturity Assessment (xls)
• Project Level Selection Tool (xls)
• Business Requirements Analyst (doc)
• Requirements Gathering Communication Tracking Template (xls)

Develop best practices to gather business requirements

• Build a Strong Approach to Business Requirements Gathering – Phase 2: Define the Elicitation Process (ppt)
• Business Requirements Document Template (xls)
• Scrum Documentation Template (doc)

Analyze and validate requirements

Standardize your frameworks for analysis and validation of the business requirements

• Build a Strong Approach to Business Requirements Gathering – Phase 3: Analyze and Validate Requirements (ppt)
• Requirements Gathering Documentation Tool (xls)
• Requirements Gathering Testing Checklist (doc)

Build your requirements gathering governance action plan

Formalize governance.

• Build a Strong Approach to Business Requirements Gathering – Phase 4: Create a Requirements Governance Action Plan (ppt)
• Requirements Traceability Matrix (xls)