Right Requirements, Right Now workshop

Will users struggle to master your products or will they slip into the user's workflow with minimal turbulence?

Higher quality requirements deliver better products. But how do you know when requirements have high quality? This workshop provides you with the knowledge to identify the inherent qualities of requirements. Your requirements will precisely identify system features that result in unambiguous code and products that deliver high value to customers.

Is your specifications template difficult to use? Do you struggle to make the information fit the document? This course gives you a specification template, distilled from many successful projects, that serves as the foundation for your new specification. The template and its accompanying requirements shell give you concrete guidelines for writing specifications.

Learning Objectives:

1. Define the requirements scope and the product's purpose
2. Identify business events and product use cases
3. Identify effective techniques for prototyping the product
4. Apply the requirements specification template to a real problem
5. Define functional requirements
6. Explore how to functional requirements as a lever to find the product's non-functional requirements
7. Determine fit criteria, or measurements for requirements
8. Make requirements traceable

Topics:

1. Requirements Engineering Process The requirements process introduces you to a solid strategy for gathering the correct requirements. In this overview you see how the pieces fit together – from the project launch that established the product's purpose and scope, the gathering and prototyping activities that elicit the product's requirements, through the quality gate where requirements are made testable, to the final review of the specification that discovers any missing, wrong or extraneous requirements.

2. Eliciting Requirements At the core of any requirements process is the ability to get people to tell you what they really want, rather than what they think you might be able to deliver, or what they feel their boss might want. We show you how to use apprenticing, video, use case scenarios, and other strategies to discover exactly what the users need, and want.

3. Functional Requirements Functional requirements are those things that the solution must do. They are discovered by inspecting the work that the user does, and then determining what part of that work the solution must do. This proposed interaction between user and solution is modeled with use case scenarios. From these, we derive and write the functional requirements.

4. Non-functional Requirements Non-functional requirements are those properties that the solution must have. These include desired appearance, usability, performance, security and so on. This session discusses the types of non-functional requirements, and shows you how to use templates and methods, to find the qualitative requirements for your solution.

5. Quality Gates All requirements must pass through the quality gate before they can be recorded in the requirements specification. This activity addresses the problem of requirements creep by rejecting non-viable and incorrect requirements. We also demonstrate how you can attach fit criterion to each requirement. This ensures that the solution you implement matches precisely to what the customer needs and values.

Testimonials:

“Scott has provided CCC a lot of value over many years. Scott has helped CCC develop good business systems analysis processes and he has also served as a great sounding board for thinking processes through and coming up with evolving best practices for our development processes. I strongly recommend Scott to anyone considering improving their business systems analysts skill sets as well as their overall development processes.”

~ Carlos Navarro, Vice President Development, CCC Information Services, Inc.

“I used Scott to deliver courses and consulting on requirements management. His methods helped with a significant transformation and positive results. The values achieved included: 1) improved communications between business development and product engineering, 2) faster prioritization of product release planning, and 3) less rework in defining requirements. I have confidence that Scott delivers what he promises.”

~ Robert W. Ferguson, Manager Engineering Process Group, 3Com

“Scott leads a class on determining product/project requirements that is world class in capturing the functional specification of a product. It comes highly recommended for organizations looking to establish a methodology for determining product requirements.”

~ Anthony DeZonno, Intellectual Property Manager, Aspect Software

“Since our training I completed use cases/requirements for a new version of one of our existing systems. The project is still in development, but is running a week ahead of schedule. We had a meeting today where we compared IT's estimates to actuals for different project phases. IT had allotted 65 hours for requirements review (based on historical data) & our actual hours were only 16. Our VP jumped on it right away & asked why. It was noted that the major factor was the solidity of the requirements & not as much time needed for clarification, etc. Obviously, this is largely due to the training we received from you & the new methods we have incorporated into writing the use cases/requirements since attending your workshop. So, thank you for that!

~ Jenny Bucek, Project Manager/Business Analyst, TMP Directional Marketing, Inc.

Instructor:

Scott Stribrny brings nearly 40-years of experience in software, systems, and management to his client engagements and his Loyola Executive Education courses. An internationally acknowledged authority in project management, information systems/technology, systems engineering, and lean development and management, Scott is revolutionizing the intersections of business, technology, and organizational risks.

Beginning a corporate career with a start-up firm that went from zero to 100 million dollars in just five years, Scott moved on to a Fortune 50 conglomerate where he worked with industry leading engineers, scientists, and the executive suite. As a leader, Scott was responsible for the development of groundbreaking products and services where he applied best practices in project management. His accumulated management experience ranges across many industries, including aerospace, telecommunications, finance, insurance, retail, information services, and manufacturing.

Scott is President, co-founder, and managing director of Group Atlantic, Inc.; a senior consultant in the business technologies strategies practice for IT research company the Cutter Consortium; and a thought leader at the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute. He is widely published on the subjects of risk management and project/program management and is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and company events. He teaches courses on leadership development, agile, high-performance teams, requirements definition, risk management, and project estimating, always providing practical, applicable (or actionable) knowledge and content and an innovative, refreshing, and engaging delivery.