Requirements Elicitation and Management Workshop

Background

"I am quite familiar with tools and methodologies to gather application requirements. I appreciate the importance of adhering to the project processes while gathering requirements and managing changes. But the real problem is in implementation! In spite of my good efforts, there are requirements errors like incorrect facts, omissions, ambiguity, inconsistency etc. It is very difficult to get sign-off on requirements and change requests from my customer. They are unwilling to pay for genuine changes even. This is leading to scope creep, cost overrun and customer dissatisfaction.."

During requirement gathering, a lot of effort goes into getting the requirements right, rather than obtaining right requirements. This happens since the methodologies, processes and tools that we follow are too much skewed towards requirements analysis and design. This bias makes one think that good processes result in good requirements. This potentially undermines the importance of managing the customer facing aspects like stake holder interests, project constraints, people issues etc. The role of Requirements Management (RM) is trivialized to managing changes and version control while it is supposed to start right from requirement elicitation stage itself.

Of course, these customer facing aspects are quite dynamic and vary from project to project. They give rise to many challenges in eliciting good requirements and managing the change requests. To overcome these challenges, one should master the art of managing stake holders and know how to customize the requirements gathering approach, elicitation techniques and negotiating the changes.

What is the aim of this workshop?

This workshop focuses on experiential learning facilitated by a highly experienced team that shares the dynamics of requirements management and the good practices followed. The workshop is also an opportunity to share your issues and learn from the collective experience of the trainers.

Who gets benefited from this workshop?

A person working in software industry with over 4 years of experience and involved in requirements gathering and project management. This workshop assumes that the candidates have knowledge of requirements analysis and design.

What is not covered in this workshop?

• Tools and their usage for requirements management
• Discussion on requirements analysis and design topics like engineering methodologies (Water fall, iterative etc.), requirements specification, DFD, ERD etc.
• Discussion on documentation structure, walking through a good requirements document etc.

What are the topics covered?

• Classification of requirements and the need
• What is a good requirement?
• Role of stake holders, approach and elicitation techniques
• Change management process
• Importance and need for Change Control
• Case studies and discussions