Scale Up Your Requirements Management Practices
Embrace business analysis at the speed and scale of your organization.
Member Challenge
- Poor requirements are correlated with failed projects. Poor requirements are to blame for as much as 78% of project failures (ZipDo, 2024).
- As more teams shift to Agile and hybrid methodologies, there is often a struggle to develop consistent practices for requirements management.
- Often, business analysts (BAs), or the role tasked with business analysis or requirements management, haven’t developed the right competencies to successfully execute and add value.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Contrary to popular belief, business analysis and requirements management are not dead. They are more critical than ever in an environment of continual disruption and upheaval.
- Good requirements practices are the key to unlocking project and product value and reducing technical debt.
Impact and Result
- Develop an outcome-based common framework for requirements management that works across teams and methodologies.
- Standardize the management of evergreen requirements (requirements as an asset), not one-time change requirements.
- Align requirements management with product backlog management and product delivery processes.
- Develop a requirements management playbook that extends your solution delivery framework.
Research & Tools
| Name | Actions |
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1. Scale Up Your Requirements Management Practices – A step-by-step guide to elevating the scale and effectiveness of your requirements management practices.
Requirements management is critical for delivering business value from projects, products, and services. Yet it remains an elusive task for most organizations. Follow this blueprint for a comprehensive approach that can be scaled to any size of project or organization.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Scale Up Your Requirements Management Practices – Phases 1-5
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2. Requirements Management Workbook – Capture the outcomes from blueprint activities.
Capture a clear understanding of the target needs for the requirements process.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Requirements Management Workbook
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3. Requirements Management Maturity Assessment – Assess the maturity of requirements management and identify gaps.
Use this tool to assess the maturity of your organization's requirements management function and identify gaps between the current and target states.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Requirements Management Maturity Assessment Tool
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4. Requirements Management BA Playbook Process – Tailor this Visio process flow for your needs.
Use this Visio template to model the flow of your requirements management process.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Requirements Management BA Playbook Process (Visio)
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Requirements Management BA Playbook Process (PDF)
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5. Requirements Management BA Playbook – Define your requirements management process, standards, and RACI.
Use this template to define practices and procedures for managing requirements in your organization.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Requirements Management BA Playbook
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6. Requirements Management Templates – Use these templates as a starting point to record, manage, and share requirements.
Examples of simple and complex requirements management templates.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Requirements Management Templates
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Onsite Workshop: Scale Up Your Requirements Management Practices
Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Do-It-Yourself Implementation
The slides in this Best Practice Blueprint will walk you step-by-step through every phase of your project with supporting tools and templates ready for you to use.
Project Accelerator Workshop
You can also use this Best Practice Blueprint to facilitate your own project accelerator workshop within your organization using the workshop slides and facilitation instructions provided in the Appendix.
Module 1: Pre-Work
The Purpose
- Establish a baseline for your requirements management maturity.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Awareness of the current-state maturity
- Serves for planning workshop activities to address significant gaps or needs
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 1.1 Complete Requirements Management Maturity Assessment (Current State) |
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Module 2: Introduction and Current State
The Purpose
- Understand your current-state maturity with requirements and set a baseline from which to improve.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Defined project leveling
- Defined requirements management processes
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 2.1 Based on the current state, prioritize risks and challenges. |
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| 2.2 Establish requirements management metrics. |
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| 2.3 Identify your project levels. |
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| 2.4 Define your high-level process. |
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Module 3: Define the Elicitation Process
The Purpose
- Identify stakeholders and define your elicitation processes.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Building a sample elicitation plan to guide requirements efforts
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 3.1 Identify typical project stakeholders. |
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| 3.2 Understand and document elicitation techniques by use case. |
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| 3.3 Create a requirements management elicitation plan for a typical project. |
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Module 4: Analyze and Validate Requirements
The Purpose
- Effectively analyze and prioritize your requirements and validate them against stakeholder needs.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A defined standard for documentation and communication with stakeholders
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 4.1 Analyze and categorize requirements. |
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| 4.2 Prioritize requirements. |
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| 4.3 Model requirements with use case diagrams or user stories. |
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| 4.4 Validate your requirements. |
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| 4.5 Create a requirements management communication plan for a typical project. |
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Module 5: Changes, Requirements, and Backlogs
The Purpose
- Establish a framework for managing changes to requirements and build a plan for continuous improvement.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A roadmap for continuously improving the maturity of your requirements management practices
- A completed Requirements Management BA Playbook
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 5.1 Develop a change control process. |
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| 5.2 Build guidelines for escalating changes. |
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| 5.3 Complete Requirements Management Maturity Assessment (target state). |
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| 5.4 Define roadmap to target-state maturity. |
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| 5.5 Identify and analyze stakeholders for communication plan. |
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| 5.6 Create communication management plan. |
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| 5.7 Build the action plan. |
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Testimonials
My first interaction with Info-Tech - I'll be able to estimate time/financial impact after we implement the recommended improvements.
Working through situational examples that happen at our company was very helpful.
I don't know how to estimate the time and money it will save. But from my team, I received excellent feedback. The only thing we need to do now is to get a tool and put these practices in place. The best part was doing the exercises and applying the t...
The team are so informed but more than that so keen to work with us to get to a great answer for our business.
Vince was the best part. He covered the material clearly, paused for questions and to check our understanding, and he even covered a topic that wasn't part of our 'curriculum' - the use of AI in business analysis. The worst part was my busy schedule, I ...
Worst: Learning the about the requirements gathering fundamentals that need to be in place to be ready up the bottom from the maturity level. Best: At the conclusion of the workshop, a roadmap to start the process to implement the requirements gathe...
There were so many applicable and executable topics that were covered. Everyone on my team talked about how much they enjoyed the discussions and items presented. Kieran is very knowledgeable and provided great insights from experience, not just book the...
Kieran did a great job presenting the information. I'm already seeing improvements in the way our team works with end-users to gather system requirements.
Best - The material was relevant, and Kieran presented with examples that really drove the critical points home. We are very new to requirements gathering, the material was laid out to help us understand how each step logically led into the next, and dem...
I found the following most useful: • Maturity Assessment • BA Task Deep Dive • Metrics • Stop, Start, Continue, conversation • Elicitation Technique recommendations by Project Level • Stakeholder Matrix I appreciated the opportunity to provide my...
Working with Vincent has been very encouraging. He is super helpful to our work and is willing to engage at a pace that is sustainable for us. Vincent regularly generates insights for us that make our work better, more focused and he help us manage our o...
We had explained our needs to the consultant tentatively assigned to facilitate our workshop, however when our facilitator changed, these needs were not properly conveyed. We had to end Day 1 early and reframe the workshop. Once we did that, everything w...
Kieran was extremely knowledgeable and was able to answer all our ad hoc questions. We left the week with an action plan and tools to get started. The team is energized and ready to go! I appreciated that we were able to walk through real examples u...
We really appreciated Kieran's flexibility. He was able to adjust the content and delivery to the attendees to make the learning experience more effective. We have some relatively newer Business Analysts in the enterprise so this workshop will help us...
Mr. Herzstein was very well prepared and knowledgeable, and he managed the sessions well. The best part was to see how the teams were engaged in the workshop activities, as the program was very interesting and engaging, while making the participants thin...
This was our first InfoTech workshop. Kieran did an amazing job facilitating to a wide range of participants. There were also add-ins that were "bonuses" that I thought were very helpful such as discussing Product Management.
Truly an enlightening experience. It gave me a sense of comfort in finding that while we need to do some internal organization and setting some uniformity and standardization, we were not completely off the mark. I do not think there was a worst side....
It is hard to estimate the value. The team did get a good foundational base on gathering requirements. With regards to worst parts it would have been nice to do this in person but nothing we can do about this. Some of the stakeholder mapping was a little...
Kieran's insight based on real-life experiences! The real-time updates to ppt slides for processes, and the worksheets we worked from were very helpful. It was very helpful to practice writing user stories with Kieran giving us on the spot feedback/cou...
Best: We were able to utilize the topics covered within the workshop and able to map that against our organization. Worst: It would have been more valuable if BAT has brought more resources from BA background to be involved in this workshop
The worst part was that I had other priorities come up, and I couldn't attend the whole event.
No worst parts Best - He was great, engaged everyone and got the most out of the folks who participated This feedback is from Paul Schuster
Presenter was knowledgeable, friendly, prepared with the right materials and was a good listner.
The extensive details within the materials is impressive and very useful. The work shop leader was excellent, I just wish more members of our team put more effort into actively participating.
There really isn't a worse part but the best part is to hear other idea and opinions and identify gaps. if we had to read thru all the material provided it would have taken a lot longer and i'm not sure everyone would have absorbed it compared to listen...
Robert is attentive, listens to our requirement and provides great insight . Unfortunately, due to our current workload, the team needs to shift the focus to immediate needs. We are postponing discussion to a later date.