Requirement Analysis is Crucial for Understanding Business Requirements
By Erick Baduy Engagement Partner, Edarat Group
Requirement Analysis is Crucial for Understanding Business Requirements
Today’s business world is becoming increasingly concerned about specifying all project requirements among the management team, which is handling the project and the client, who is at the receiving end. Clients sometimes complain that their expectations are not fulfilled and what they wanted to include, hasn’t been included. Requirement analysis is crucial for handling such cases.
We at Edarat Group give a lot of attention to the requirement analysis phase because we believe that the success of any project relies on our consultants understanding of the customer expectations. Our Collaborative Project Management Approach (CPMA) is designed in a way to bridge the Gap between our Customers’ expectations and Edarat Group consultants understanding of the end customer objective.
The term refers to documentation of business requirements specifications. It is essentially related to business expansion because oftentimes there’s a gap between AS-IS and To-Be architecture, which obstructs growth of a business. A gap analysis bridges the gulf between what it is and what it should be. To begin with requirement analysis, the very first step is gathering information. To gather information in a systematic way, the project team needs to conduct a brainstorming session with the client. Brainstorming is better than the conventional listening method, because listening isn’t interactive. Brainstorming on the other hand, invokes the client to share his ideas with the project team; these ideas are jotted down and analyzed later. Such interactivity could clear away doubts and misapprehension about the project even before its beginning.
Clients often have a vague idea regarding what they actually want; reason behind this is that they lack technical knowledge and couldn’t ideate whether their budget is suitable for the requirement. A good consultant team should be able to visualize assumptions by clients and estimate how much benefit and risk and budgetary constraints (If any) are associated with the idea. Upon finding discrepancies, clients could be advised to give it a second thought.
Another effective way to gather information is to interview key decision makers related to the project. The lookouts are, questions should be on-topic and must cover clients’ preferences and expected functionalities. After gathering all the requirements, it’s then time to implement them. Not all requirements are of the same importance. Implementation prioritizes the ones that are important. Once the requirements are properly defined, they should be documented in lucid language and conditions should be adequately defined. This could help in tracking business and IT requirements in the final process.
To handle changes in IT requirement or business requirement during the course of project, the team should break the development process down into smaller phases and then set milestone before each phase, such as, if a certain percentage is completed, major changes won’t be allowed to introduce. Edarat Group delivery model follows this same methodology as for every consulting project our team follows a Product Breakdown Structure (PBS) that is developed by our Project Management Office. Every PBS is broken down to phases and milestones. As for unreasonable timeline, the project team could create a draft plan detailing project plan, tasks and resources required in each single step and then persuade the client with the help of the plan that coins strategies/objectives to jump from AS-IS IT to To-Be IT Architecture in terms of gap analysis. Once requirement analysis is addressed in such a methodical way, it helps understanding all the key requirements related to the project.
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