Getting the requirements “right” (transactional requirements, data requirements, analytic requirements) is difficult. Most organizations struggle to get the requirements “right” regardless of the amount of time and resources expended on the effort.
In today’s fast moving, highly competitive, complex business environment, organizations cannot afford suboptimal functionality resulting from systems (in-house developed or vendor solutions) predicated on ambiguous and incomplete requirements.
Our Business Systems Requirements workshops use a cohesive set of intuitive business oriented visual diagrams (e.g., process maps, activity diagrams, etc.), a proven framework, and best practice methods to rapidly identify, critically analyze and clearly specify forward facing business systems requirements.
A significant portion of your requirements initiatives are accomplished in weeks rather than months.
Transactional requirements represent the functionality that supports and enables “users” to do the things (work activities) that they need to do. The first step in the requirements process is identifying the requirements.
Most organizations lack a consistent definition of a “requirement” and lack a consistently applied best practice approach to identifying requirements. Accordingly, most organizations struggle to identify a comprehensive set of requirements - let alone analyzing and specifying the requirements.
This results in a requirements process (identification, analysis, and specification) that consumes significant time, but produces incomplete and ambiguous requirements – which are then used as the basis for system design and development and/or selection of vendor solutions.
Working with your team, we provide our deep analysis experience and expertise, including best practice tools, techniques, and methods, to facilitate high-intensity short-duration sprints to rapidly and accurately identify a comprehensive set of transactional requirements to move forward into deeper analysis and specification.
The workshop is designed for Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), business analysts and systems analysts,
developers (associated with the in-scope business systems), supervisors and managers and other stakeholders with knowledge of the business space.
The business systems requirements process includes three key components: identification, analysis, and specification of requirements. The focus of the previous workshop is on the identification of requirements. The focus of this workshop is on analyzing and specifying the requirements.
Analyzing requirements requires deep and sophisticated engagement with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and other stakeholders as well as gleaning information from other sources (existing artifacts, external customers, etc.).
Visual models/diagrams and scenario analysis (as opposed to bullet lists and text-based narratives) are essential to deep engagement, elicitation, and validation of requirements with SMEs and other stakeholders.
The visual models/diagrams and the other analysis artifacts are then organized into clear, thorough, and accurate specifications using an industry standard use-case format optimized for business systems requirements. Each requirement is specified by a use-case.
A use-case is not an analysis tool, it’s a best practice framework for specifying requirements. A properly formed use-case enables all parties (SMEs, stakeholders, the technical team, management, vendors, etc.) to “get” the requirement from viewing the same requirement document.
Working with your team, we provide our deep analysis experience and expertise, including best practice tools, techniques, and methods, to facilitate high-intensity short-duration sprints that rapidly and accurately analyze and specify the transactional requirements within the scope of the initiative.
The workshop is designed for Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), business analysts and systems analysts, developers (associated with the in-scope business systems), supervisors and managers and other stakeholders with knowledge of the business space.
Business systems application software functionality is typically provided by custom build and/or vendor product solutions. Business systems requirements are a prerequisite to both types of solutions.
Business systems requirements for a vendor RFP vary from a custom build solution in two important ways – scope of the requirements to include in the RFP and the specificity and level of detail of each requirement:
Also see my recent blog post: Business System Requirements: Custom Build vs. Vendor Product.
The purpose of a vendor RFP is to provide an objective basis for selecting an appropriate vendor and their solution to support your requirements. Accordingly, in addition to business systems requirements, a vendor RFP typically includes additional components to enable vendors to provide an objective response to the RFP.
Working with your team, we provide our deep analysis experience and expertise, including best practice tools, techniques, and methods, to facilitate high-intensity, short-duration, sprints that rapidly and accurately identify, analyze, and specify applicable business systems requirements – at the right level of detail to include in your Vendor RFP.
The workshop is designed for Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), business analysts and systems analysts, developers (associated with the in-scope business systems), supervisors and managers and other stakeholders with knowledge of the business space.
An organization’s business vocabulary (its terms and concepts) and the business rules that define these terms and concepts comprise an organization’s data-oriented business rules.
Data-oriented rules provide a stable foundation for analyzing business processes, business systems requirements, and business intelligence requirements. A logical data model (entity-relationship diagram) is a visual representation of data-oriented business rules.
In many organizations, data-oriented business rules live as ambiguous institutional knowledge, informally, largely in the minds of the people doing the essential day-to-day work of the organization, and rarely subject to critical analysis.
However, these informal rules unofficially govern how organizations operate, how decisions are made, and are often used to communicate data-oriented business system requirements. Ambiguous data-oriented requirements result in costly, rigid, maintenance-intensive information systems that lack the agility to support a rapidly changing business environment.
Based on decades of experience, Inteq has uncovered and refined the foundational patterns of data-oriented business rules. Working with your team, we provide our deep analysis experience and expertise, including best practice tools, techniques, and methods, to facilitate high-intensity, short-duration, sprints that utilize these patterns to rapidly discover, critically analyze and precisely specify, data-oriented business rules via entity-relationship (ER) diagrams.
The workshop is designed for Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), business data analysis, business analysts and systems analysts, developers (associated with the in-scope business systems), supervisors and managers and other stakeholders with knowledge of the business space.
Business data is growing exponentially - in volume, velocity, and variety! Customer requirements, competition and innovation are driving rapid changes in business requirements and supporting business processes.
Decision makers, at all levels of an organization, require accurate, current, cohesive business data to glean actionable intelligence and insights to make effective tactical and strategic decisions.
All organizations today recognize the value of business data analytics. However, many organizations are not yet realizing the full potential of their data.
The problem is not with the enabling technologies. The technologies are stable and well understood. The problem lives with asking the right business questions, properly analyzing the supporting business data, and presenting and communicating the results in a clear, cohesive, intuitive manner.
Working with your team, we provide our deep analysis experience and expertise, including best practice tools, techniques, and methods, to facilitate high-intensity, short-duration, sprints to identify business analytic requirements (e.g., strategic & tactical decisions, business questions, performance metrics, etc.) and the underlying data-oriented business rules that support the analytic requirements.
The workshop is designed for Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), business data analysis, business analysts and systems analysts, developers (associated with the in-scope business systems), supervisors and managers and other stakeholders and decision makers with knowledge of the business space.
