Defining and Managing IT Project Requirements

Description:

Course overview

Reduce IT project time and costs. Gain the necessary information to develop a proactive environment for requirements management. Identify, document, analyze, track, control, and manage changes in requirements throughout a project’s life cycle. Determine key roles and responsibilities in requirements analysis and management. Discover the importance of allocating and tracing requirements, validation, and verification. Develop tools and techniques to use throughout the requirements process, methods to conduct an inspection, and ways to reduce risks.

Prerequisites

• A comprehensive introductory project management course such as Project Management Fundamentals (HC577S) plus Project Risk Management (HE536S), Leadership and Communication Skills for Project Managers (HE537S) and other core project management courses

Audience

This course is intended for project managers, project team members, technical leads, systems engineers or anyone with a substantive role in the success of projects who is interested in best practices that apply to diverse projects in multiple industries. It is especially suited for people seeking project management certification.

Benefits to you

• Identify, document, track, control, and manage changes in requirements throughout a project’s life cycle
• Understand the key roles and responsibilities in requirements analysis and management
• Learn methods to conduct an inspection and ways to reduce risks
• Prevent potential problems from become serious and causing schedule and cost overruns

Course outline

Overview

• Explain why good requirements are critical for project success
• Differentiate between behavioral and non-behavioral requirements
• Determine the hallmarks of a good requirements process

Requirements in the IT/IS Development Process

• Use a “best practice” model for requirements as viewed through the Software Engineering Institute’s SW-CMM®
• Determine differences in requirements gathering based upon the SDLC model used
• Explain the importance of making requirements gathering a repeatable process

Setup and Startup

• Identify the key requirements stakeholders and conduct a stakeholder analysis
• Identify hard and soft resources of requirements
• Explain the inputs and outputs of a requirements repository and define a requirements classification scheme

Identify and Document

• Collect and clarify requirements using surveys, interviews, JRP/JAD sessions, workshops, simulations, usability studies, and prototypes
• Prepare requirements documents
• Describe the attributes of system requirements specifications and requirements traceability matrices

Analyze and Refine

• Describe the role of the requirements analyst
• Explain partitioning and decomposition of requirements
• Identify the usefulness of prototyping and modeling

Review and Approve

• Describe the review and approval process
• Determine the inspection process
• Discuss the roles and responsibilities of the inspection team

Allocate and Trace

• Explain the importance of the requirements allocations and traceability
• Allocate requirements
• Track requirements throughout the project life cycle

Verify and Validate

• Discuss verification and validation techniques
• Be able to validate requirements with clients
• Demonstrate that requirements have been satisfied

Change Management

• Use change control tools
• Incorporate changes to project requirements
• Ensure that links are traceable throughout project documentation