Washington University in St. Louis
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BAC375: Critical Skills for Writing Better Requirements (14 hrs)

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Course summary:

Our failure to understand users’ requirements is the most common source of project defects, delays and cancellations. The accumulating evidence is unequivocal: most serious problems associated with projects are related directly to requirements. Critical Skills for Writing Better Requirements attacks the problem of project failures by addressing their root causes: incomplete, poorly defined, and/or changing requirements.

This two-day course will give you hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques for gathering requirements and better business writing. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises will provide you with the competence and confidence to improve project outcomes through better requirements elicitation. You’ll gain a thorough understanding of the challenges faced in defining correct requirements, practical approaches for eliciting and documenting requirements and strategies for managing requirements throughout the project life cycle. If you participate in defining project scope, capturing requirements, or managing project scope, you can’t afford to miss this course!

Course outline:
  • The Business Case for Requirements of Engineering
  • Foundations of Requirements Development
  • Project Initiation
  • Eliciting Functional and Non-functional requirements
  • Use Cases: A First Look
  • Reviewing and Refining Requirements
  • Creating a Requirements Specification
Learner Outcomes:
  • Improve tools and techniques for gathering and developing more precise requirements
  • Increase customers' satisfaction by determining and understanding their true needs
  • Prevent errors in specifications by defining project scope up font
  • Identify the key players and learn to communicate effectively with them
  • Learn how to collect and use metrics so you can plan better
  • Lower development/maintenance costs by designing cost-effective processes
  • Understand how to plan and manage the software development life cycle more effectively
  • Develop templates and checklists that work
  • Save money by reducing and managing 
  • Improve business process and analysis techniques to reduce project cost

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Recommendations:
Target Audience
  • Business Customer Partner who wants to work more effectively with IT colleagues to identify project requirements for solving business problems.
  • Business Analyst who needs to define or gather users' business requirements
  • Business Systems Analyst who wants to understand user's business requirements , translate them into clear statements of functional and system requirements and add value to IT projects
  • Systems Analyst who must develop correct technical specifications from functional and system requirements
  • Designer or Developer who desires to produce a high-quality system from the functional and systems requirements
  • Project Manager or Team Leader who must ensure that IT project team members correctly understand customer needs and deliver high quality solutions within project constraints.
Have questions?
Contact us if you would like to speak with a program director or visit our Frequently Asked Questions page.