Another critical component of CBAP training is Requirement Life Cycle Management. As a business analyst we manage requirements from origination to final implementation and further maintenance throughout the product life cycle, until its retirement. CBAP Training at Education Edge addresses this extremely important concept by giving real life examples.
Requirement Life Cycle Management knowledge area describes the tasks that business analysts perform in order to manage and maintain requirements and design information from inception to retirement.
The purpose of requirements life cycle management is to ensure that business, stakeholder, and solution requirements and designs are aligned to one another and that the solution implements them.
The requirements life cycle:
- begins with the representation of a business need as a requirement,
- continues through the development of a solution, and
- ends when a solution and the requirements that represent it are
The management of requirements does not end once a solution is implemented. Throughout the life of a solution, requirements continue to provide value when they are managed appropriately.
The Requirements Life Cycle Management knowledge area includes the following tasks:
- Trace Requirements
- Maintain Requirements
- Prioritize Requirements
- Assess Requirements Changes
- Approve Requirements
It is important to review BABOK for how BACCM related to Requirement Life Cycle Management area.
Trace Requirements:
The purpose of Trace Requirements is to ensure that requirements and designs at different levels are aligned to one another, and to manage the effects of change to one level on related requirements.
- Requirements traceability identifies and documents the lineage of each requirement, including its backward traceability, its forward traceability
- Establishes relationship to other requirements.
- Traceability is used to help ensure that the solution conforms to requirements
- faster and simpler impact analysis,
- more reliable discovery of inconsistencies and gaps in requirements,
- deeper insights into the scope and complexity of a change,
- reliable assessment of which requirements have been addressed and which have not. The output of the task are Requirements (traced) and Designs (traced).
Maintain Requirement:
The reasons we maintain the requirements as a business analyst is because we want to ensure accuracy of the requirement along with keeping them current. The purpose of Maintain Requirements is to retain requirement accuracy and consistency throughout and beyond the change during the entire requirements life cycle, and to support reuse of requirements in other solutions.
Maintaining requirements entails ensuring re-usability, maintaining attributes while focusing on keeping a track of changing attributes.
The primary outputs are Requirements and Designs that are maintained and kept current throughout the life cycle of the project.
Prioritize Requirement:
The purpose of Prioritize Requirements is to rank requirements in the order of relative importance. The reason we Prioritize requirements is due to the fact that organizations face constrains and it is important to understand those critical requirements that will lead to stakeholder satisfaction.
Ranking based on their relative value to the business.
Below is the list of various different elements that must be considered while Prioritizing the requirements:
- Basis of Prioritization – Prioritize based on Benefit, Penalty, Cost, Complexity, Time Sensitivity, dependency, regulatory or compliance.
- Challenges with Prioritization – Prioritization is an assessment of relative value. Each stakeholder may view value something different. When this occurs, there may be conflict amongst stakeholders. Stakeholders may also have difficulty characterizing any requirement as a lower priority, and this may impact the ability to make necessary trade-offs. In addition, stakeholders may (intentionally or unintentionally) indicate priority to influence the result to their desired As business Analyst trade offs may help in these situations.
- Continual Prioritization – For example, stakeholders may initially prioritize based on benefits. The implementation team may then re-prioritize the requirements based on the sequence in which they must be implemented due to technical constraints. Once the implementation team has provided the cost of each requirement, the stakeholders may re-prioritize yet again.
Finally, the output is Prioritized Requirements and Design.
Assess Requirement Changes:
The purpose of Assess Requirements Changes is to evaluate the implications of proposed changes to requirements and designs.
When assessing changes, business analysts consider if each proposed change:
- aligns with the overall strategy,
- affects value delivered to the business or stakeholder groups,
- impacts the time to deliver or the resources required to deliver the value, and
- alters any risks, opportunities, or constraints associated with the overall initiative.
Elements such as Assessment formality, impact analysis along with impact resolution will be considered while assessing changes to the requirement.
Outputs are Requirement Change Assessment and Design Change Assessment.
Approve Requirements:
The purpose of Approve Requirements is to obtain agreement on and approval of requirements and designs for business analysis work to continue and/or solution construction to proceed.
Business analysts are responsible for ensuring clear communication of requirements, designs, and other business analysis information to the key stakeholders responsible for approving that information.
Approval of requirements and designs may be formal or informal.
Predictive approaches typically perform approvals at the end of the phase or during planned change control meetings.
Adaptive approaches typically approve requirements only when construction and implementation of a solution meeting the requirement can begin.
To gain approval, as business analysts we must understand the stakeholder roles, follow approval process, build consensus and track the approvals. This at times may also requires conflict resolution to get stakeholder buy-in.
The primary output of this task is Approved Requirements and Design.
