7 Ways to Kick Start IT Development

Getting the right business and stakeholder requirements for software development is arguably the most challenging step in software development. Nearly every study over the past 40 years has pinpointed missing and misunderstood IT requirements as the primary cause of IT project failures and overruns. Agile Software Development approaches have significantly increased the potential for project success but even Agile projects suffers from 30% - 40% failure rates. The importance of early discovery and capture of initial visions, business and stakeholder requirements, features, or User Stories cannot be overstated. The requirements you identify, discover, elicit, or gather are the foundation for the remainder of the work on the product or project.

The problem is that the project stakeholders are not entirely sure what they need the IT application to deliver. They have ideas and often discuss problems and opportunities, but are not trained to express those in the form of actionable requirements. This course presents 7 requirements elicitation techniques for getting IT requirements from product stakeholders. The authors have used these techniques on hundreds of IT projects around the globe and know the value each provides. Every presented technique will greatly improve your ability to elicit effective features and/or requirements (which is the ultimate challenge).

In this course, you will learn how to help the business community discover business needs that form the basis for  Product Requirements Documents, Product Backlogs, or Feature Lists. It presents specific business analysis techniques for identifying stakeholders, analyzing relevant business problems, helping stakeholders discover what they don't know they need (but still want the solution to deliver), and a set of key questions you need to answer to initiate and manage the process. Applying these techniques will significantly improve your initial Product Backlog, Feature List, or Product Requirements Document and increase the probability of a successful project.

We design our courses with a mix of “talking-head” instructor videos augmented with “Intellimated” visual aids proven to improve comprehension and increase retention.