Defining and Managing Project Requirements [ONLINE]

In today’s ever-changing world, complexity is unavoidable. Whether you are engaged in formal project work or you are accountable for creating policies, improving operational performance, launching a new product, good or service, or creating solutions that drive organizational change, your success is highly dependent on well-defined and understood business requirements, product requirements, and specifications. Investments in requirements processes have proven to be key contributors to success in any endeavour.

This one-day program focuses on the requirements management process. Using an exercise taken from a real-life project, participants will learn how to define the problem, assess its business impact, and identify and manage stakeholders’ expectations. Participants will use elicitation tools and techniques to discover the underlying requirements that contribute to solutions that produce desired outcomes. Through the use of techniques for clarifying expected deliverables and discovering overlooked requirements, participants will be better prepared to work on projects characterized by uncertainty and high levels of change. The course will cover requirements verification, traceability and change management techniques for both predictive and agile project environments. Participants will discover different ways to present requirements to stakeholders to maximize comprehension and encourage feedback.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Participants will gain practical skills to:

• Utilize an enterprise requirements management framework and processes
• Identify impacted stakeholders and discover and define their real problems
• Realize and uncover real requirements using various methods and tools
• Create appropriate questions to ask in surveys, interviews, job shadowing, and JAD sessions
• Discover functional requirements that deliver business value
• Document requirements clearly using standard formats, including user stories and use cases
• Analyze, verify, and validate requirements
• Refine, manage, and control changes to requirements
• Use a hierarchical solution selection process to build a foundation for future requirements
• Conduct financial analysis of proposed solution(s) to maximize benefits realization
• Prioritize, select and present the best requirements solutions to problems/opportunities
• Transfer a practical requirements management methodology back to the workplace

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

This course is designed for project managers, business analysts, project sponsors, and those who will be actively involved in defining business needs and clarifying scope at the start of an initiative.

Istructor: Inez Halaska, BFA, CMP

Inez Halaska has two decades of project management experience across a broad range of projects types including construction (both as an owner’s rep and as a vendor), information technology implementations, business re-organizations, and event planning. Her expertise covers all aspects of delivering successful projects from up front strategic planning, needs analysis and project definition, through project planning, delivery, and commissioning, to change management and benefits realization. She is currently a practising project manager running projects for a government regulator in the energy industry but her work experience spans government, private, and non-profit sectors.

Inez worked as a client representative in the construction of the Creative Kids Museum in the TELUS Word of Science facility in downtown Calgary. There she handled coordination with various business units, actively participated in weekly construction team meetings, provided business direction, and participated in quality assurance activities and deliverables acceptance. She also participated in the high-level planning for the relocation of the TELUS World of Science facility including parking studies, defining requirements, and a research study analyzing other science centre renovation/expansion projects from across North America.

Host or Publisher Goodman School of Mines