Cont: - Approach used during the requirement definition phase:

Depending upon the type of project, stakeholder and complexity of the problem; Functional Consultants follows different techniques to elicit and analyze the business requirements. The table lists techniques and when each technique might be useful.

Cont: - Business Analyst's Toolkit

Definition Phase:
Projects usually begin with a vague idea about the business problem that exists and how to solve the problem. The objective of definition phase is to understand existing business processes by asking business clients and stakeholders why the system is necessary and what the system requires in order to support the business

Tasks performed by the Functional Consultant:
1. Understand and document the current business processes.
2. Determine the high level business requirements.
a. Please do not confuse them with high level system functionalities.
b. Requirement must be focused towards, how user is going to ‘use’ the proposed application and not on the desired features in the application.
3. Define the system boundary to get clarity on the in-scope and out-of-scope of the project.
4. Identifying the business actors that will benefit from the proposed system
5. Identify the high level essential business use cases.
6. For each relevant use case, identify the essential activities performed by the User. Capture that information into activity diagram. This can be called as High Level To-Be business process diagram.
7.Prepare and share the “understanding” document with the client on a fortnightly or monthly basis; which highlights the current level of understanding on the proposed application and any challenge foreseen by the analyst team

Functional Consulting - Business Analyst's Toolkit

Large Application Development projects can be categorized in following phases:
1. Definition
2. Analyze
3. Design
4. Construction
5. Validations & Support

Based on type of project, whether it’s inclined towards consulting or a full fledge development activities, the time spend in each phases varies. Functional consultant depending upon the phase in which he/she is working play a different role to support the project activities.

In the series of blogs, readers can go through the different phases of the project and get an understanding on the critical tasks performed by the functional consultants and also the type of deliverables/ artifacts developed by them during each phases.

As each project is unique to the client therefore Consultants can use this blog as a reference point (like a checklist) and later customize their approach based on client’s methodology or project’s specific requirements.

I have taken inputs from the leading requirement management consulting firms who are willing to share their best practices with others, like - The Atlantic Systems Guild Inc., Watermark Learning and Process Impact, to inject best practices for the requirement management processes.

I will try to provide links to their sites in the following blogs, which can lead to quite interesting articles/ templates on the requirement management process.

This blog also incorporates some relevant inputs from the functional consultants at the end of one large application development project.

Hope you will find the following series of blogs an interesting read!!