COURSE 2100 | 2-DAY PUBLIC SESSION | 3-DAY VIRTUAL SESSION
Critical Skills for Writing Better Requirements

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Eliminate Costly Changes and Save Time by Nailing Down the Project Requirements - the First Time!

Learn how to:

• Improve tools and techniques for gathering and developing more precise requirements
  
• Increase customers’ satisfaction by determining and understanding their true needs
  
• Prevent errors in specifications by defining project scope up front
  
• Identify the key players and learn to communicate effectively with them
  
• Learn how to collect and use metrics so you can plan better
  
• Lower development/maintenance costs by designing cost-effective processes
  
• Understand how to plan and manage the software development life cycle more effectively
  
• Develop templates and checklists that work
  
• Save money by reducing and managing ever-present scope creep
  
• Improve business analysis techniques to reduce project cost
  
• Write and refine requirements to reduce ambiguity

Gather Clear and Concise Business Requirements Before the Project Starts
Our failure to understand users’ requirements is the most common source of project defects, delays and cancellations. The accumulating evidence is unequivocal: most serious problems associated with projects are related directly to requirements. Critical Skills for Writing Better Requirements attacks the problem of project failures by addressing their root causes: incomplete, poorly defined, and/or changing requirements.

Fixing Requirements Errors is Costly…Preventing Them Isn't!
Lost-dollar value and cost overruns comprised $55 billion in wasted spending on American IT projects. The cost of correcting requirements defects in software projects is estimated to account for 70% of all project rework costs. And for every $1 in effort needed to detect and correct errors during requirements definition, up to $200 must be spent to detect and correct errors by the time the project is in implementation.

By investing in just a few key skills and using them consistently, you can save significant money and time on projects, and ultimately deliver higher-quality solutions to your customers.

Discover the Real-World Techniques That Will Help You Immediately
This two-day course will give you hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques for gathering requirements. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises will provide you with the competence and confidence to improve project outcomes through better requirements elicitation. You’ll gain a thorough understanding of the challenges faced in defining correct requirements, practical approaches for eliciting and documenting requirements, and strategies for managing requirements throughout the project life cycle. If you participate in defining project scope, capturing requirements, or managing project scope, you can’t afford to miss this course!

20 Immediately Useful Benefits You Will Receive:

1. Appreciate the challenges analysts face in defining requirements.
   
2. Understand the characteristics of a well-written requirement.
   
3. Examine, review and refine requirements so they are specific, accurate and unambiguous.
   
4. Produce a clear, concise Software Requirements Specification.
   
5. Effectively analyze business problems your customers face.
   
6. Understand the needs of users and other customers.
   
7. Clearly define the scope of a project.
   
8. Use effective practices for interviewing business customers to learn their requirements.
   
9. Learn the basics of business process modeling for eliciting requirements.
10. See how to use elicitation workshops (such as JRP, focus groups, etc.) to quickly and accurately identify project requirements.
    
11. Gain exposure to the “use case” technique as a way to discover requirements.
    
12. Examine ways to discover and write business rules that affect a system.
    
13. See how to use a requirements traceability matrix to map requirements.
    
14. Understand the importance of categorizing and prioritizing requirements.
    
15. Effectively communicate with project stakeholders at all levels.
    
16. Minimize the risk of producing an ineffective (or just plain
    wrong) solution.
    
17. Distinguish business and user requirements from technical or system requirements and know when it’s appropriate to define and document each.
    
18. Translate high-quality functional and non-functional requirements into clear and correct system requirements or technical specifications.
    
19. Manage project scope by identifying and managing changes to requirements throughout the project lifecycle.
    
20. Shorten project schedules by defining the right requirements in the right way the first time, every time!
    

In Class Group Exercises:
In-class exercises help you identify and examine firsthand problems that you may be experiencing. Through group effort, you and your peers will discuss ways your department or company should be handling problems up front and how you can improve those early, critical stages.

Specifically, you will:

• Learn to elicit requirements from a realistic business case project
  
• Use the analysis method to discover important aspects of the project scope
  
• Develop business model components such as a context diagram, activity diagram and use case model
  
• Work as a team to analyze business artifacts and documents to discover the functional requirements needed
  
• Learn to identify and extract important requirements from a process model
  
• Evaluate preliminary requirements and identify those that don’t meet defined quality characteristics
  
• Review work already completed and see how to extract important non-functional requirements