The Conceptual, logical & Physical designs are the building blocks to a successful technical implementation, these three areas of concentration are the secret sauce to integrating innovation into your organization. Without the development of these documents you’re inadvertently accepting several innate risk. This will be a four part post that will explore all of the design documents required to successfully deliver a solid solution, the first post will talk through the requirements from a stand point of assisting the business in defining the actual requirement or if you are the technical individual whom came up with the idea, to help shape the argument as to why your idea is going to bring a value add to the business.
The requirements
The requirements are the first phase of any successful implementation, during this phase the great ideas are turned into more of a technical solution for a newly discovered required capability.
I’m a strong believer that a Business Analyst role or function is necessary to abstract the great ideas out of the business and turn around to the technical teams and regurgitate the facts in a technical sense. This processes in itself may very well and most often require several meeting to shape the requirements into reality.
I took a look a job description on dice.com out of curiosity to see what the requirements are these days for a Business Analyst and came across the one show below which I found interesting from the area of questioning, Does your organization have a position like this, or is this just an additional duty as assigned, in my professional experience I have facilitated this role as an additional duty as assigned and to me it gives you a closer vision as to what value the technical teams are bringing to the business and honest it’s a quite rewarding feeling.
The Business Analyst position will drive the gathering and documentation of requirements from the key business areas, and partner with architecture and design teams to define technology solutions.
• Collaborate with business partners from multiple disciplines to elicit, document, prepare and manage business requirements package for stakeholder sign-off and delivery to technical teams
• Establish meaningful traceability between related requirements
• Act as a liaison between the business and IT design and delivery teams
• Documented requirement artifacts should utilize industry standard diagram techniques to enhance the clarity of definition, including: process flows, context diagrams, use cases, wireframes, etc.
• Set requirement baselines upon obtaining requirements package sign-off and support requirements change management, analyze impact and obtain change sign-off on the Technology Delivery Life Cycle (TDLC) or Scaled Agile frameworks.
• Interface with Business Partners, Technical resources (i.e. Solution Engineers, Systems Analysts, Developers), Architecture, and Quality Assurance to translate and simplify requirements, ensure requirements are met throughout entire TDLC or Scaled Agile frameworks, and verify that the implemented solution meets the requirements
• Partner with QA team and SMEs to ensure adequate test coverage (relying on own knowledge, as well as facilitating conversations with SMEs, to identify additional test scenarios)
• Identify and articulate the need for requirements change and assessing the impact of the change
• Work with stakeholders to conduct training sessions / demos, and to develop manuals / user guides