How would you like a toolkit of guidelines and templates at your finger tips and ready to apply in your next business analysis effort?

It would be insanely useful!

But often business analysts find themselves in situations with no predefined set of tools, and non readily available.

So I’m going to show you what you need to do to create a custom set of tools and templates.

But firstly…

One of the biggest challenges of writing a business case is getting people to read it.

You’ve poured your heart and soul into the business case document. It is full of several weeks worth of meticulously researched and beautifully presented information.

But it is lengthy, somewhat boring, and quite often the business stakeholders already know the outcome (because you have done a brilliant job of socialising your work in progress). Or they’re just too busy to pay proper attention to this vital tome of information.

The stakeholders just want to see adequate justification for change.

There are two things you can do to make weeks of hard work worthwhile. But firstly, give up on the idea of getting people to read the whole document.

In this post I am going to tell you about 2 things you must do to ensure good coverage of business requirements for your project.

Why is this important? Because business requirements are the defining statements for the goals, objectives, or needs of the enterprise.

They describe why a project is initiated, the things that the project will achieve, and the metrics which will be used to measure its success (adapted from BABOK version 2.0).

Well defined business requirements helps to avoid expensive mistakes. Without them, your project will be like a ship without a rudder. It can’t get any more important than this.