Level 4: Designing & Facilitating Requirements Workshop

Overview
Recent studies confirm a key reason for project failures is inadequate business requirements and analysis. Here is the only 4-level integrated Requirements Analysis curriculum, with 4 two-day hands-on workshops to (1) thoroughly analyze business systems needs and solutions, (2) elicit, define, and write crisp requirements, (3) apply a Use Case model and (4) facilitate a Requirements Workshop using Joint Application Design. These team based workshops take learners from beginner to advanced levels with sound easy to apply methodology, tools, reference materials and case studies.

Objective
Designing and Facilitating Requirements Workshop, also called Joint Application Design (JAD) is a structured meeting of both business and systems professionals to extract high quality business requirements specifications in a much compressed time frame. Using a structured approach, visual aids and the customers own language, participants in this hands-on workshop learn to lead meetings that create consensus and clarity about system requirements.

Practical and realistic hands-on exercises and activities in a team based setting allow participants to plan and facilitate requirements workshops. Working in small teams, students learn tools and techniques to build a meeting structure, handle disruptive members, mine the collective knowledge of the group and obtain consensus. Case examples abound.

The payoff is potential reduction of scope creep (from 80% down to 10%), increased delivery speed in early phases by 30-40% and overall savings of 5-15% in total time and effort.

Key Learning Points

• Planning and Facilitating Requirements Workshop for maximum productivity
• Lead Joint Application Design workshop
• Facilitation, presentation and active listening skills to extract real requirements and build consensus
• Brainstorming, Cardstorming Creativity Techniques to mine the collective knowledge of your subject matter experts (SMEs)
• Build related components of the systems life cycle
• Clarify the scope before ‘scope creep’ becomes an issue
• Facilitate the correct use of Context Diagrams, Class Diagrams, Use Cases and Entity Relationship Diagrams and ‘Post-it’ notes to capture and prioritize requirements
• Understand how to assist the business beyond requirements gathering

Recommended for
For senior professionals on the systems and business sides, who have either completed some predecessor courses in the Integrated Business Requirements curriculum or who have equivalent experience who are now working at a high level of System Specifications and need to learn to facilitate joint application design workshops.