Why it is critical to define the business requirements?

In any organization, the project development begins with respect to the business requirements. In order to make any project successful, it is imperative to determine its business needs. The business requirements are the fundamental aspect of business analysis. It is the business analyst who is responsible to gather the requirements from the client and should specify them clearly. In simple terms, the business requirements are defined as the process of discovering, analyzing, defining, and documenting the requirements which are associated with a particular business objective. It also helps to define the scope of the project clearly and precisely, so that the time and resources required to accomplish the project can be calculated easily.

It is not an easy task for a business analyst to elicit the business requirements; they should be able to find out the critical business requirements and also provide guidance to the business in articulating these requirements to start any Business Analysis work. Their main objective is to first identify and clearly define the critical business requirements to achieve the business objectives. If the requirements are not defined clearly in a project, it may result in several issues such as an increase in the time and effort, excessive rework, increase in the conflicts between the stakeholder, more errors in the project. To avoid such issues, the business requirements should be defined clearly in the project. There are a few important steps to define the business requirements in a project:

1. Ensure that the business requirement supports the business goals and objectives of the organization:

As a part of determining a particular business requirement, it is required to analyze the business goals and objectives of an organization’s at the beginning of the project. The organization’s strategic plan contains this planned information, which begins with the organization’s task and vision. The business objectives are the strategic statements which describe the modifications that an organization wants to establish or the existing conditions that an organization wants to keep up. A single business goal can be divided into different fields, such as client satisfaction, operational quality, or the business evolution. These objectives must be deteriorating into a set of more measurable business targets. The business objectives express the pre-set outcomes for which the effort is coordinated, for example, a dynamic position to be accomplished or a purpose to be completed.

2. Ensure that the business problems or opportunities in an organization are clearly specified:

You must be able to examine the various business issues or opportunity to make sure that there is a good purpose to proceed further and address that specific issue. The issues in the project should be specified clearly because the project is an approach to enhance your business and add value to your business. The benefits and risk associated with the project should also be identified.

3. Prepare a detailed description of the desired results that come from specifying the business requirements:

It would be a challenging task to define the expected result of a future project. If the business requirements meet the business goals and objective it would result in various benefits. We should not get confused between the expected result and the solution; they both are the different thing. Though the solution options will be estimated with the expected outcome to ensure that they can provide the anticipated business benefits.

Sometimes defining the business requirements would be a challenging task due to the following reasons:

Conflicts in the Requirements:

Business requirements may become tough because of the involvement of different stakeholders in defining the requirements. When there are different stakeholders involved in a project, each of them may have different needs and hence there is a possibility of increase in the conflicts. This is one of the critical challenges in defining the business requirements.

Ever-changing requirements of the clients:

The clients exactly don’t know what they want in their project and therefore they keep on changing the business requirements. This is the other challenge faced by the Business Analyst during the requirement gathering process.

Changing Priorities:

One more common challenge faced by the business analyst is the changing priorities in requirements. The clients won’t stick to single requirements, they keep changing their minds. Initially, the client comes with one set of requirements and later on they change the priority of the requirements. Due to this, the time and effort may increase in the project development and hence there will be a delay in project delivery.

Inaccessibility of Stakeholders:

In order to collect the requirements, the business analyst should meet with the stakeholders, even if they have chosen a technique for requirement elicitation like interviews, observation, prototyping, etc. The stakeholders are the person with needs and expectations for the change or project on which you are working on. But it would be a challenging task for the business analyst to meet with these people. They may not be always available because of their busy schedule or they do not want any change or modification in the project.

Well, below are some reasons that represent why defining the business requirements is a critical starting point for an organization:

1. Purpose: If the business requirements are specified clearly in the early stages of projects, it provides you a clear understanding of the modification that is being initiated. The identified business requirements are used in defining an expected upcoming state of the project, to assess the possible solution which confirms that each solution fulfills the needs and also select the best possible solution which satisfies those needs. To know the current state of the project, it is required to understand the business need. The business need associated with the existing state of the project helps to disclose the current limits which have to be considered while assessing the possible solutions.

2. Increases motivation: Setting the goals and objectives of a project is the important part of any business. By knowing how the project’s goals and objectives satisfy the requirements of the business can motivate the members of an organization, as they can observe how their efforts have the positive effect in the growth of the organization.

3. Confirms satisfaction: If the client is not satisfied with the project’s outcome, it would be a waste of time and effort in the project. With the requirement validation technique, the business analyst can increase the possibility of gaining the stakeholder satisfaction and design the project as per their requirements.

4. Reduces conflicts: If the business requirements are communicated properly, it reduces conflicts between the various stakeholders involved in the project. Also, it allows the business analyst to quickly clear those changes which are not in the project scope.

Go through our Business Analysis Interview Questions to crack the Interviews.

Conclusion:            

Thus, while starting a project defining the business requirements is a critical task to obtain the required result. The requirements should involve all the features and functions of the proposed project. If the business requirements are not specified clearly it would result in rework, delay in the project, excessive time and effort, etc. It is also important to document the requirements. The business requirements should be documented in such a way that it is easily understood by all the parties for example customer, development team. It should also be free from ambiguities.

Need for cybersecurity, the attractiveness of crossover skills, the data-driven nature of technical projects, etc., there will be a huge demand for business analysts in the upcoming year.

I hope that by now you have had an overview of Business analysis. Before you enroll in ZaranTech’s certification course on Agile BA do check out this demo video: