Defining & Managing Project Requirements

In today’s ever-changing world, complexity is unavoidable. Whether you are engaged in formal project work or you are accountable for creating policies, improving operational performance, launching a new product, good or service, or creating solutions that drive organizational change, your success is highly dependent on well-defined and understood business requirements, product requirements, and specifications. Investments in requirements processes have proven to be key contributors to success in any endeavour.

This one-day program focuses on the requirements management process. Using an exercise taken from a real-life project, participants will learn how to define the problem, assess its business impact, and identify and manage stakeholders’ expectations. Participants will use elicitation tools and techniques to discover the underlying requirements that contribute to solutions that produce desired outcomes. 

Through the use of techniques for clarifying expected deliverables and discovering overlooked requirements, participants will be better prepared to work on projects characterized by uncertainty and high levels of change. The course will cover requirements verification, traceability and change management techniques for both predictive and agile project environments. Participants will discover different ways to present requirements to stakeholders to maximize comprehension and encourage feedback.

By the end of this course, participants will gain the practical skills to:

• Utilize an enterprise requirements management framework and processes;
• Identify impacted stakeholders and discover and define their real problems;
• Realize and uncover real requirements using various methods and tools;
• Create appropriate questions to ask in surveys, interviews, job shadowing, and JAD sessions;
• Discover functional requirements that deliver business value;
• Document requirements clearly using standard formats, including user stories and use cases;
• Analyze, verify, and validate requirements;
• Refine, manage, and control changes to requirements;
• Use a hierarchical solution selection process to build a foundation for future requirements;
• Conduct financial analysis of proposed solution(s) to maximize benefits realization;
• Prioritize, select and present the best requirements solutions to problems/opportunities; and 
• Transfer a practical requirements management methodology back to the workplace.

This course is also sometimes called "Defining and Managing Project Requirements" and "Understanding Project Objectives: Business, Requirements and Scope."