For almost all projects—good and bad—the link between requirements and project success is self-evident: successful projects have a clear understanding of what has to be built; and unsuccessful projects have consistently failed to produce adequate requirements.
While this seminar will hone your requirements skills, its intention is to show you how to use the requirements products as input to effective project management. Planning, decision-making, estimating the needed effort, setting priorities and many other facets of project management are all fed by the natural by-products of a solid requirements process.
This seminar gives you:
- Connections between project success indicators and good requirements practices
- Using the outputs of requirements as input to project management
- Methods for assessing the impact of new requirements in existing systems
- Meta management techniques—approaches for keeping track of connections between tasks, people and technologies in large projects
- Inventing better products
- Extreme requirements—agile processes to give you fast results with minimum waste
- Building and maintaining good stakeholder relationships—the sociological structure your project needs to survive
- Implementing effective cost analysis of a requirement
- Building your own requirements knowledge model to satisfy your communication and traceability needs
Is this for me?
This seminar is appropriate for business analysts, systems mangers, project leaders, consultants
and systems analysts and planners.
The material is aimed at people who are experienced requirements engineers
and are already familiar with business events, product use cases, context
models, functional requirements, non-functional requirements and constraints.
The sister seminar, Mastering the Requirements Process,
covers all of these concepts.
What will I learn? What will I be better at?
1. More Effective Requirements
- The link between requirements and project management
- Requirements knowledge model
- Project success indicators
2. Requirements Sociology
- Managing stakeholders and their interest in the project
- Building your decision-making structure
- Analysing your communication demands
- Project sociology analysis
3. Inventing Better Products
- Inventing the products people want
- Creative triggers
- Balance between stated needs and invention
- Consolidating your team's ideas
4. Requirements Value
- Investing in requirements
- Value of requirements
- Contract via requirements
- Prioritising and negotiating requirements
5. Meta Management
- Multi-technology projects
- Inter-project requirements and interfaces
- Requirements for COTS
- Assigning responsibilities
6. Existing Systems
- A systemic view of the world
- Understanding the new and its impact
- Systems dynamics modelling
- Choosing your strategy
7. Stories
- Stories and prototypes
- Serious play—managing your creativity
- Involving customers in your prototyping
- Connecting users' stories to requirements
Workshops
This course includes intensive workshops that give you the opportunity
to apply the concepts presented. The case study is a multiple technology
project involving a mixture of sub-projects concerned with embedded software,
a web site, COTS software, custom built software and business processes.
Participants work in teams and explore the extended requirements ideas by:
- Defining the critical requirements success factors
Planning your Skinny Framework
Participants also get the chance to interact personally with the instructor,
receive advice on their own situations, and discuss how the ideas from this
seminar can be implemented in their own work environment.
All participants receive a free copy of the new book by Suzanne and James Robertson: Requirements-led Project Management: Discovering David's Slingshot. From Barry Boehm's foreword:
You'll find this book a treasure trove of experience-based guidelines and illustrative examples on how to get the requirements right on your project. These include guidelines and examples on treating the requirements as an investment activity in Chapter 2; getting the right people involved and understanding their cultures in Chapter 3; techniques for stimulating mutual learning and a shared vision among stakeholders in Chapter 4; the use of prototypes and simulations in Chapters 5 and 6; dealing with legacy systems in Chapter 7; and managing systems requirements, systems of systems requirements, and requirements processes in Chapters 9, 10, and 11. Each chapter concludes with a nicely balanced set of "What do I do right now?" and "What's the least that I can get away with?" checklists.
As a bottom line, the book does a wonderful job of lifting its readers from a focus on templates and objects to a focus on people's needs, capabilities, and ability to work together to achieve a shared vision of the requirements (and the design) for a system that will satisfy all their needs and constraints. I hope you have the opportunity to use its practices on your next project.
— Barry Boehm
Learning from Experience
Suzanne Robertson is a leading consultant, teacher and researcher in the world of systems analysis and requirements engineering. She has written some of the most successful courses on systems analysis, quality assessment, problem solving, and software design for both procedural and object-oriented systems. Apart from her books, Suzanne is author of many papers on systems engineering (many of these papers are on the Atlantic Systems Guild web site). She also speaks at many conferences and universities. She is a member of IEEE and the Australian Computer Society and on the committee of the British Computer Society's Requirements Group. She is editor of the Requirements column in IEEE Software magazine.
Suzanne is co-author of Requirements-led Project Management: Discovering David's Slingshot, Addison Wesley, 2004 and Mastering the Requirements Process, Addison Wesley, 1999. She has also written Complete Systems Analysis: the Workbook, the Textbook, the Answers , Dorset House, 1994, a two-volume text and case study that teaches the craft of systems analysis.
How do I get it?
You may contact the Atlantic
Systems Guild directly.We also have agents worldwide who will be happy
to make the arrangements for you.
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