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Quality requirements are essential for success

As mentioned above, requirements for COTS will take longer than for a custom built solution.  Things to remember about requirements are:

  • Don’t fall into the trap of believing that a vendor can provide you with requirements, they sell solutions; requirements must always be yours
  • Requirements are about business needs and not information technology features available; don’t put the cart before the horse
  • Make sure that the right people are involved in providing the requirements:
    • Strategic/Corporate – Senior Management
    • Operational/Departmental – Middle Management
    • User – Present system users
    • IT – There to provide information on how the current systems work, not to propose requirements

Requirements must be based on your business processes; vendors cannot give you their processes with the expectation that they will meet your business needs.  There are significant risks of using processes supplied by vendors:

  • Processes will, most likely, be incomplete and the solution will be missing important components
  • You are in danger of omitting technology-enablers that support your particular corporate differentiators
  • User acceptance and morale can be severely impacted when they realise that the solution provided doesn’t work for them

Elicitation

Approaches to elicitation have changed significantly recently with the increased of remote or hybrid working, workshops are increasingly taking place using Zoom and Teams.  The advantages and disadvantages of various approaches are shown in the following table. 

Approach Advantages Disadvantages Comments
Remote workshop
  • Avoids travel restrictions
  • Possible lower costs
  • More challenging to facilitate
  • Can be difficult to know who is contributing
  • Easier for participant to hog centre stage
  • Inability to easily view body language
 I recommend that the first workshop of a series is held onsite if possible to give participants a chance to meet one another
Onsite workshop
  • Easier to maintain multiple flipcharts/whiteboards
  • Easier to direct questions to an individual
  • Can avoid unnecessary attendees
  • Can be difficult to assemble everyone in the same room
  • Unwillingness of people to congregate with others due to health concerns
 It is always advantageous to meet and form working relationships
Remote one-to-one
  • Easy to setup
   I recommend that the first one-to-meeting is held in person held onsite if possible to give each a chance to meet
Onsite one-to-one testing
  •  Good for establishing working relationships
    

Deliverables

It is important that the deliverables that will be produced during requirements elicitation are identified and agreed.  The single most important document will be the Business Requirements Document (BRD), it should contain the following sections, as a minimum:

Section Purpose
Business Objectives To reaffirm the reasons for proceeding with the initiative
Process summary An overview of all the processes described in the BRD
Scenarios Detailed descriptions of all the business scenarios and their component activities
Functional requirements Requirements that are expected to be supported by a system
Data requirements The data that must be maintained by a system to support the identified processes
Requirements Traceability Matrix A check to insure that all the system functions necessary to support the business processes have been identified

The BRD must be in plain English with no computer jargon so that the stakeholders can clearly understand and approve the requirements.