Getting Proper Requirements in a Project

Mastering Requirements: From Elicitation to Value Realization

This guide delves into the crucial aspects of requirements management, analysis, and design, emphasizing their interconnectedness in delivering successful solutions.

Requirements Life Cycle Management (LCM)

Requirements LCM encompasses all activities involved in managing requirements and design information throughout the project lifecycle, from initial conception to solution retirement. It ensures alignment between business needs, stakeholder expectations, and the delivered solution.

Key Principles:

• Requirements LCM is an ongoing process, not a one-time activity.
• It extends beyond solution implementation, continuing until the solution is retired.

Key Tasks:

1. Trace Requirements: Establish and document the lineage of each requirement, including its relationships to other requirements and its backward and forward traceability. Traceability facilitates:

   • Impact analysis
   • Inconsistency and gap detection
   • Scope and complexity understanding
   • Requirements coverage assessment

2. Maintain Requirements: Ensure requirements remain accurate and up-to-date throughout the lifecycle. This involves continuous review and updates as needed.

3. Prioritize Requirements: Rank requirements based on their importance, urgency, and risk. Prioritization considers:

   • Benefit
   • Penalty
   • Cost
   • Risk
   • Dependencies
   • Time Sensitivity
   • Stability

   Prioritization is an iterative process, evolving as the project progresses and new information becomes available. It often involves trade-offs and requires stakeholder agreement.

4. Assess Requirements Changes: Evaluate proposed changes to determine their impact on the solution’s value, scope, and feasibility. Consider:

   • Alignment with overall strategy
   • Impact on value delivery
   • Impact on schedule and resources
   • Altered risks, opportunities, and constraints

   For each proposed change, assess:

   • Benefit
   • Cost
   • Impact
   • Schedule implications
   • Urgency

5. Approve Requirements: Secure stakeholder agreement on requirements and designs. This involves clear communication, managing approval processes, and documenting decisions. Use tools like the RACI matrix to clarify roles and responsibilities.

Requirements Analysis and Design Definition

This phase focuses on structuring, organizing, and detailing requirements, creating models, validating information, identifying solution options, and evaluating their potential value.

Key Tasks:

1. Specify and Model Requirements: Describe requirements and designs in detail using analytical techniques and visual models (diagrams, matrices). Models aid in communication and understanding.

2. Verify Requirements: Ensure that requirements are sufficiently detailed, internally consistent, and of high quality. A good specification is clear, concise, and fit for its intended use. Key characteristics of quality requirements include:

   • Atomic
   • Complete
   • Consistent
   • Concise
   • Feasible
   • Unambiguous
   • Testable
   • Prioritized
   • Understandable

3. Validate Requirements: Confirm that requirements deliver business value and support organizational goals. This is an ongoing process that may reveal conflicting stakeholder needs.

4. Define Requirements Architecture: Structure requirements and designs to achieve overarching business goals and ensure they work together effectively. This focuses on how components interact, not just traceability.

5. Define Solution Options: Identify, investigate, and describe potential solutions to the problem.

6. Analyze Potential Value and Recommend Solution: Evaluate the business value of each solution option, considering trade-offs, and recommend the option that maximizes overall value. This may involve analyzing multiple options and potentially conducting proofs of concept.

Tools for Requirements Gathering

RACI Matrix

A RACI matrix, also called a RACI chart or responsibility assignment matrix, is a tool used in project management to identify and assign roles and responsibilities to different stakeholders.

A RACI matrix helps to clearly define who is responsible for each task or decision in a project, who is accountable for its completion, who needs to be consulted during the process, and who should be kept informed of the progress.

Clarifies roles and responsibilities for each task or decision (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed). Especially helpful for meetings and approvals.

The matrix is typically displayed as a table, with each task or decision listed along the top and the stakeholders listed along the left side. Each cell in the matrix then indicates which of the four different roles applies to that particular task or decision.

• Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed.
• Keep it in mind when creating meetings.

Diagrams are also useful, see Draw.io