Right-Sizing Documentation

Janis is an award-winning journalist and editor who has covered many industries beyond project management, including health care, financial services, higher education and retail sales.

  Requirements Management   Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

New research reveals practical strategies to help business analysts match requirements documentation to the project at hand. The goal: Docs that are lean and “just enough.”

Insightful business analysts are borrowing a page from the agile playbook when it comes to software requirements documentation. They are seeking to produce less weighty, less prescribed requirements docs in response to the project’s needs and team dynamics.

Tips and ideas about how to achieve this are contained in a new Forrester Research report by app dev and project management expert Mary Gerush, “Thinking Lean: How Much Requirements Documentation Is ‘Just Enough’?”

Gerush says that it’s time to let go of text-heavy tomes created by following established processes blindly. “Making a change to lean documentation is critical,” she says. “We’ve spent a lot of years establishing methodologies and prescribing templates, and our business analysts have likely done a really great job of following methods and filling out templates. But one of my clients summarized the problem with that: When you have process and methodology in place, people think they don’t need to think, so they put away their own brains. With requirements docs, we haven’t taken a step back to see what value they add. ... We need our business analysts to think…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.