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"How to Capture
Customer Requirements and Develop Project Scope"
Question: How can you
better satisfy your customers’ needs, manage their expectations, banish scope
creep and assure project success?
Answer: By capturing
correct and complete project requirements.
This popular course provides
pragmatic techniques for capturing, specifying, and managing requirements. You
will increase your skill in speeding delivery of the right solution and develop
insights that help you delight the customer with innovative solutions. It is
rich with examples that will help you recognize differences between good and bad
practices.
Through a step-by-step case
study exercise, you will study basic concepts, as well as some of the best
practices of effective organizations.
Who should attend?
Anyone interested in improving performance
of projects, programs, and organizations. This includes project managers,
project management offices, executives, customers, users, technologists and
project facilitators. This seminar is applicable to any kind of project, not
just systems and software.
How you will benefit
Develop and enhance the contributions you make to
your organization by being able to:
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Discover both spoken and unspoken requirements
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Ask the “three magic questions” that elicit
essential information
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Select content appropriate for business
requirements, and organize it for prioritization and traceability
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Use the G-O-A-T Matrix to select appropriate
techniques for requirements capture
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Write concise, compact, specific and
unambiguous detailed requirements that precisely describes needed functions
and performance requirement
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Appropriately use agile project techniques to
increase speed, flexibility, and innovation
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Write use cases to clarify what does the user’s
“What” rather than the product’s “How”
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Increase your leadership skills so that you can
work collaboratively with customers
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Develop insights that will allow you to be more
innovative and better serve clients
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Tailor a proven set of techniques to your own
process
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Identify, confirm and document project
boundaries
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Apply a basic template for specifying project
requirements
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Recognize the difference between requirements
and design specifications
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Establish priorities
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Recognize the pitfalls that lead to enormous
costs, rework and errors (The #1 mistake is confusing design with
requirements!)
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Describe the 1:10:100 rule of cost avoidance
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Distinguish between good and poor
specifications
Your seminar experience will cover:
You will work through an exercise to learn
about the following essential concepts of requirements capture:
Translating
requests to requirements: Why and how to define
wants, needs and requirements. You will learn critical leadership perspectives
that allow the project team to work collaboratively with customers and
sponsors to get a complete and correct understanding of the underlying
business issues and scope, including unspoken requirements.
Asking solid
questions that help deliver the right solution:
Over 35 effective questions that anybody can ask. You will learn a
disciplined, practical approach for developing rapport, trust, and
credibility. You will get practical advice for managing the “you are the
expert” pitfall.
Writing
requirements: A straightforward, compact
template for writing unambiguous, verifiable functional and performance
requirements. With the block diagram, you will be able to create organized,
complete, traceable documents, with the appropriate level of detail. Novices
often ignore or improperly handle subsystem interfaces, but you will see tips
to recognize and manage them effectively. Key points for reviewing and
approving requirements.
Faster
Projects and Awesome Products:
Iterative and agile project management
approaches that speed project delivery. A disciplined approach to delighting
the customer within the bounds of budget and available time.
Eliciting and
validating business, system, and user requirements:
Techniques include a simple, straightforward
approach to developing and writing use
cases, field observation, contextual analysis, “V” model, mind mapping, the
includes-excludes table, and prioritization through the triple constraint.
Defining scope:
The three kinds of scope you must define and
manage.
Tailored
delivery: Develop a personalized action plan for
bringing the many course learnings back into your organization.
Instructional
Methods
Case for small group work that includes
solution sets. Lectures and discussions will enhance your understanding of this
complex and vital subject.  E-learning
and webinar options are presently in development. We also perform a
pre-course learner needs assessment, methods review, and post course follow up.
How is this course
different?
First off, by our personal actions, we demonstrate
that we "walk our talk:" we ask questions and probe for your needs and then
tailor delivery to your specific needs. Second, we keep a balanced mix of
examples for learners: some are technical systems and some are ground in the
everyday reality of making a personal purchase. Third, we emphasize a "light
touch" and don't insist that people fill out mind-numbing templates and
checklists. Fourth, we stress that "fast to learn is fast to deliver" and show
how personal leadership skills - such as inquiry - can create positive work
relationships and innovative solutions to clients needs. Fifth, included
in our course deliverables are "key learnings" and "good questions" that people
can take back and put to immediate use. Sixth, you can personally interview your
instructor, Greg Githens. Seventh, this course has achieved high recognition by
the Project Management Institute's ® SeminarsWorld since 1998 as well as PMI®
chapters.
Catalyst offers
training and coaching, too.
NEW!
We have a new course
that complements this course:
"How
to Describe Your Needs To Achieve the Right Solution, Delivered Quickly"
is a 1 day course for customers and users.
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