Requirements Gathering

The damage is that almost two-thirds of all application system defects can be traced to incomplete, inaccurate, or missing requirements. So, how do you...

	Differentiate between wants and needs?
	Specifically minimize information loss, misunderstanding, and ambiguity?
	Develop standards for good requirements?
	Calculate true needs tied to the mission and eliminate wasted processes?
	Help customers verbalize their unknown needs?

This seminar, based on a research project by the Quality Assurance Institute including over 50 companies, offers practical techniques to get requirements right. The study showed a potential hundred-fold economic return on the effort expended to improve requirements definition. When true impacts to the user community are included, the economic return can be far greater. It is designed for people with various levels of familiarity with major basics of requirements gathering and installation in projects.  It is specially designed to greatly decrease errors in the information gathering and dissemination process of requirements gathering. 

This course covers how to identify, diagnose, parse and reform errors in requirements; what everybody should know about how to listen for cues in language that indicate ambiguity and vagueness and other things you'll be able to do:

1. Define the challenge of getting valid requirements, including specific reasons why requirements are often invalid
2. Identify sources of quality problems related to requirements, ways they can be ambiguous, and how to help remove ambiguity
3. Understand a six-phased procedure for developing requirements
4. Use manual and automated tools to improve requirements
5. Use models to interactively improve rapport, interview techniques, and question elicitation strategies via NLP metamodeling strategies
6. Increase active listening and comprehension skills.

Includes

	Detailed surveying and optional interviewing of participants for course tailoring
	4 day intensive seminar
	Substantial morning, daytime, noon, and evening individual Navigating The Obstacle Course Coaching©
	Detailed seminar workbook
	Follow-on WEBinars to integrate performance on the job
	Free digital CD: All PowerPoint slides plus full audio transcript
	Airport transportation and transit to evening recreational events (public seminar only)
	High quality lodging in seminar hotel with 3 gourmet buffet meals daily (public seminar only)

It is held in a 4-day session. The first 2 of the 4 days is an interactive tutorial with exercises sharing a new process model for requirements gathering and implementation. Research is shared relating to common causes of invalid and defective requirements and their remedies.  The process model reduces ambiguity, separates needs from wants, and facts from opinion.    

The remaining 2-day session is broken into 4 equal 1/2 day sessions, having the following structure: Tutorial and training; Live demonstrations; Directed practice and coaching using real company requirements.  

The 1/2 day sessions are:

	The Requirements Mission - Process - Requirements (MPR) model to calculate true needs
	The Rapport - Process - Interview - Process - Rapport (RPIPR) interviewing model to minimize defects during information gathering
	Elicitation strategies to minimize ambiguity and increase focus, especially for users who don't know what they need.  The answer to "I'll know it when I see it."
	Active listening, demonstrated understanding, and integration of all previously learned models.