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Optimizing Requirements

Discovery

An executive discussion on getting success through

clear,

accurate, and

complete requirements

Garry McGouldrick

Senior Vice President

IAG Consulting

[email protected]

1-800-209-3616

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Learning Objectives

Executive perspectives on making

requirements change

Techniques for optimizing requirements

discovery

The tactics of requirements competency

development

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Our Experience:

Requirements excellence since 1997:

Completed over 1,300 requirements projects

Worked with over 300 of the Fortune 1000 companies

Trained over 100,000 professionals

In excess of 700 clients using our methods

Annually invested 10% of our revenue in developing our methods and

harmonizing these with industry best practices

Authors of The Business Analysis Benchmark

Clear, Accurate & Complete WITH Efficiency

http://programs.rational.com/partner/SearchResults_Company.cfm?CMP=1903

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Executive Perspective

Issues to discuss The requirements phase of projects is risky

Inconsistency is expensive

Facilitation excellence is necessary for consensus and timeliness

Process can be improved or is broken Unnecessary requirements change Ineffective use of delivery resource Effective use of executive time

Compliance issue or dramatic change needed in project performance

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How Good is Your Organization at Defining

Requirements?

1 5 2 3 4 We do an

excellent job on

requirements

Were poor at

defining

requirements

Were about

average

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There is a Steep Premium to be Paid for Poor

Quality Requirements

Premium

paid

BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS PREMIUM*

N=109

Source: IAG Business Analysis Benchmark, 2008

* Average increase in the overrun on time or cost versus projects that used high quality requirements

1 5 2 3 4

Low Quality

Requirements

High Quality

Requirements

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

Time

Budget

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Case Study: Michigan DOT

RFP Outsourced Development

SafeStat: Monitor and track the progress of traffic and safety projects

$1 million project

Compressed requirements discovery into 2 week timetable 10 weeks

from start to design

RFP responses from domestic vendors were +/- $30K (IBM, EDS, etc)

Able to use precision in requirements to secure performance

guarantees

Brought project in 30% under budget

Reduced ongoing maintenance costs

Without this process, we would have spent the entire $1m we had budgeted. Plus, we may have encountered scope creep that could have pushed the costs up even higher

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Deeper Dive into Our

Approach and

Deliverables

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The Requirements Dilemma

How do you serve diverse needs well?

Executive: What change is happening and will I get the

functionality and information needed?

Business: Is there a proactive, efficient way to get process

and interdependencies identified?

Designer: What are the series of highly cohesive and loosely

coupled system components?

Enterprise Architect: How do we expect the solution to

interact with the existing architecture?

Tester: What are all the paths of logic through this process?

Project Manager: Have we identified issues, scope, timeline

and achieved consensus?

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Focusing on the What Not the How

Requirements: you will always be describing a process

Somebody

Does something

With some information

Person or the system

Process: Verb

Data: Noun

This is: Scoping and High Level

Requirements

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A Logical Way to Extract Business Process

Scoping:

Example: Customer Order Management

COM

SYSTEM

CUSTOMER

Store/

Products/

Price/

Promotions

Order/

Payment

Confirmation

Customer

Info.Inquiry

Previous

Order

Order

Transactions

ACCOUNTING

SYSTEM

Deposits

MARKETING

Order

Reciept

FINANCIAL

INSTITUTION

Product

Promotions

THIRD PARTY

DELIVERY

COMPANY

Method Of

Payment

Credit Card

Authorization

Order

Details

Delivery

Details

Payment

Understand

system

context

High-Level: Determine Activity-Level Scenario 1. Order Taker verifies contact information

2. System validates the customer

3. Order Taker takes the order

4. Order Taker confirms the order

Determine High-Level Scenario

1. Receive an order 2. Price an order 3. Fulfill an order 4. Ship an order

Set products in catalogue (X) Promotions? (Y) Dispatch? (X)

How do I get from

Trigger to Outcome?

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A Logical Way to Extract Business Process Example: Customer Order Management

High-Level: Determine Activity-Level Scenario 1. Order Taker verifies contact information

2. System validates the customer

3. Order Taker takes the order

4. Order Taker confirms the order

Determine High-Level Scenario

1. Receive an order

Could you build it?

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Black Box versus White Box Understanding Getting to clear, accurate and complete

Must have: Conditions/constraints, Variations, Rules/policies,

Data required in the process, Interdependency, Clear process

Supplier

Who supplies

the information?

Input

What information

do you need

access to?

Process

What do you do

with the

information?

Output

What is the

normal

Outcome?

Customer

Who do you

make the

output

available to?

Could you build

it? Validate the

Customer

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Discovering Detail Efficiently System validates the Customer

Determine Detailed Process Description 1. Determine if customer exists, using either

1. Phone number

2. Last Name

2. If exist: Display customer information

3. If not exist: Display no match found

(create new customer)

4. If >1 match: Display all matches

5. Determine (select) match

(Display customer information)

6. Verify identity, using both

1. Zip code

2. Password

7. If no verify: (terminate)

8. If change update information

Complete and Unambiguous Process,

Interdependencies, Data Requirements,

Clear Business Requirements

Goal:

Structured Statements of System Capability

Business Functional Requirements 1. The system must access a customer file using

either a phone number or last name

2. The system must display customer information

when given a request for an existing

customers data

3. The system must allow the operator to create a

new customer

4. The system must display a list of all customers

with the same phone number or last name to

the operator,

5. The system must allow the operator to select a

name from a listing of multiple customers

where multiple customers have the same name

and/or phone number

6. The system must display to the operator zip

code and customer password when a customer

record is selected

7. The system must prompt the operator to

validate that the information displayed is

correct

8. The system must allow the operator to update

customer information when the information has

changed Could you build it?

Is it clear for all stakeholders?

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Business Requirements Modeling

CONTEXT MODEL

HIGH LEVEL SCENARIO(s)

IN SCOPE

ACTIVITIESIN SCOPE

ENTITIES

USE CASES

Review, Analysis & Validation

Elicit scenarios

(primary and variations)

Model the activity / use case

- data flow / use case diagrams

Define pre and post conditions

- detailed steps/components

NounsVerbs

Model the entity relationships

Define the entities

Define the data elements needed

DATA DEFINITIONS

Discover and describe the requirements,

rules and considerations

FUNCTIONAL

REQUIREMENTSNON-FUNCTIONAL

REQUIREMENTS

DATA

REQUIREMENTS

Requ

irem

ent

Spec

DESIGN

CONSIDERATIONS

Busi

ness

Need

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Case Study: Global Food Manufacturer

Implement major change to the business model

Reduce order to delivery from 7 days to 36 hours

Transform supply-chain management, traffic and transport, CRM,

production planning, forecasting, marketing, and sales operations

Reduced number of warehouse inventory touch points from 11,000 to

2,000

Engaged IAG at the pre-project scoping stage to drive project momentum

Lead facilitation for total redesign of warehouse and inventory

management processes

2 weeks to scope project: carved into 12 complex projects to be run by

IAG

IAG executed on detailing the business and software requirements for the

12 projects taking 1 to 3 weeks for each.

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The Importance of Excellence in Elicitation

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Project success ratios: organizations that excelled in 5 of 12 requirements

discovery and management skills versus all others surveyed

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

Project is failure or

almost failure

Neither Successful

nor Unsuccessful

Project is Successful or

Unqualified Success

Leveraging Exceptional Competency to Get Excellent Project Results

Uncover

interdependencies

Getting to

unambiguous goals

and objectives

Quality of session

facilitation

Efficient use of

stakeholder time

Completed in short

period

Source: IAG Business Analysis Benchmark, 2008

0.0%

21.4%

78.6%

12.8%

45.7%

31.9%

Used Exceptional Elicitation Skills All Other Projects

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Case Study: Global Insurer

Integrating multiple companies on a single back-end system

18 months doing reengineering to get a single window on a customer out of 15

separate systems. Could not move forward too complex, could not manage the

consensus.

IAG was brought in by the re-engineering company.

Small team worked with 12 divisions to drill down to a harmonized process and data

model

Compressed cycle of elicitation for dispersed community of stakeholders: Video conference links and smart boards to manage distributed teams

Ran 2 concurrent teams to meet time constraints

3 iterations delivered to the board: 4 weeks Business model

12 weeks Logical process and data model

16 weeks Ready to build system use cases

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Making Effective Change

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A Practical Approach to Analyst

Professional Development

Combine training with on-the-job coaching and mentoring

Develop a multi-level accreditation that fits your company needs

Track and manage through an accreditation management system

Endorsed by:

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Four Golden Rules for Making Change in the Area of

Business Requirements

Never underestimate the difficulty in making change

People need to experience a new process to understand

how it is different

You can get stakeholders together

Elicitation excellence takes time to build

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Maturity of Business Analysis: (across people, process and technology of business analysis)

Project Success Ratios: Organizational score across 9 factors of areas of organizational

maturity in requirement discovery and management

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

Lowest Level

Highest Level

A Path to Systematic Project Success

Per cent

of Project

Outcomes

Proportion of projects

described as

SUCCESSFUL

Proportion of projects

described as

UNSUCCESSFUL

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Case Study: Large North American Bank

Requirements Practices Integration Improvements to Requirements Management Process

New templates, examples, instructions, etc.

New Requirements Course curriculum

Licensing of methodologies (Software Prioritization House of Quality)

Requirements Simulation Programs

Assessment Test

Accreditation Program for Requirements Managers

Web-based E-Learning Licenses

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The Secrets Revealed!

Employ analysts who are also expert facilitators

Use a superior process

Apply tight quality control

Operate in an accelerated environment

Consolidate consensus with real-time documentation

Reduce rework significantly

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Metrics: What impact can IAG Consulting have

Reduction in Changes to Requirements

Pre-IAG Consulting Post-IAG Consulting

Measured at 6 clients, across 36 projects!

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Discussion of next steps

Typical Next Steps:

1:1 conversations about your projects

Start leveraging the IAG assets to help you with your

stakeholders

Let us help you scope the business analysis effort

Tell us about your ugly ducklings

optimizing requirements discovery slides

Documents

requirements projects

requirements excellence

unnecessary requirements

requirements dilemma

requirements phase of

executive discussion

project performance

safety projects