Writing IT Requirements for Traditional Methodologies
Learn how to write effective IT requirements that reduce project failures. This course provides 4 simple rules to improve common understanding and communication between requirement authors and solution providers. Perfect for subject matter experts, product owners, business analysts, and anyone involved in defining future IT applications.
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
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 IT Requirements for Traditional Methodologies” gives you a set of 4 simple rules that will make your requirement statements more easily understood by all target audiences on traditional (aka “Waterfall”) projects. 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.
(DISCAIMER: This course does not cover User Stories)
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!
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