Needs and Requirements: Watching out for Mistakes

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

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Topics: Business Analysis, Requirements Management, Stakeholder Management

How does a business analysis process put together requirements with more accuracy and less mistakes? Gathering the requirements from stakeholders is a difficult operation, not to mention putting the information down and making sure the content accurately reflects intent. Large and small projects for both large and small organizations have challenges; however, there are a number of ways to keep them down to a minimum.

Performing Strong Stakeholder Analysis
On many occasions, resources get assigned to projects at a very early stage. This creates conditions where an undefined process can be made by project teams without having a firm understanding of what is actually wanted and needed.

Rather than have efforts begin impatiently and with incomplete directions, a business analyst instead needs to engage stakeholders to perform a full analysis. Admittedly, some stakeholders may be overlooked during the course of a project as additional business components are identified, thereby creating potential informational rifts if their input is not solicited in a timely manner. In these situations, the business analyst needs to be actively engaged and aware of changes while verifying throughout the project timeframe that new ideas or one-offs don’t get added in a mad-dash scramble.

Being Business Driven
It’s easy to construct requirements from a technical perspective and…

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