Part Three – Requirements Life Cycle Management

By Retta Witter, Senior Consultant, J. Geiger Consulting, Inc. 

Have you heard of the term Requirements Life Cycle Management (RLCM)?    Many of us have heard the term but don’t know what it means or how it applies to your job?  Last week we talked about how to elicit the requirements (Part Two – Business Analysis Body of Knowledge Blog Series) and the week before we talked about Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring (Part One – Business Analysis Body of Knowledge Blog Series). Those two knowledge areas really impact RLCM.  Once you have the requirements, how do you maintain them, their changes, and prioritize them?    This week we are looking at the Business Analysis (BA) knowledge area Requirements Life Cycle Management (1).

“The requirements life cycle:

• begins with the representation of a business need as a requirement,

• continues through the development of a solution, and

• ends when a solution and the requirements that represent it are retired (2).”

Having been doing IT work since the Y2K scare, I have started many different jobs either as a new opportunity or as a for-hire consultant.  I have worked on teams that were documentation and process rock stars and ones that were working on becoming rock stars.  If you remember from last week, I talked about understanding which technique to use based on the person from which you are eliciting the requirements.  Reading and interpreting your stakeholder is key.  I have worked on a project where I asked all the questions from several stakeholders to help understand the requirements, however when it came time to get those requirements approved no one was listed as the owner of the requirement and it took a long time to get approval.  Also, If a change was needed, it took a long time to get that through change management.  I must admit it got very challenging and not in a good way to work on that project regularly.  If that team had put in place a quality RLCM process flow it would have been easier.  RLCM helps to align the business, stakeholders, and solution, assuring that everything works together.

I love sports and playing them and if you ask my son he will tell you I am persistent when it comes to blocking and tackling (yes that is a football reference but I grew up in Wisconsin and am a Cheesehead all the way) or the fundamentals.  I hate it when people “carry the ball” (basketball reference).  Being able to do the foundational work well is important.  The outputs from the RLCM knowledge area are used a lot in the Requirements Analysis and Design Definition (RADD) knowledge area.  That knowledge area is a large part of any project and you must have your requirements as polished and accurate as possible.  We all know with continuous improvement practices, changes to requirements will and should happen.

As stated before, I will be focusing on different pieces of knowledge for each knowledge area. This week, I would like to talk about the Business Analysis Core Concept Model™ (BACCM™). There are six parts to BACCM, and it is a part of each knowledge area. 

They are:

Change: the act of transformation in response to a need.

Need: a problem or opportunity to be addressed.

Solution: a specific way of satisfying one or more needs in a context.

Stakeholder: a group or individual with a relationship to the change, the need, or the solution.

Value: the worth, importance, or usefulness of something to a stakeholder within a context.

Context: the circumstances that influence, are influenced by, and provide an understanding of the

change.

There are specific ways each core concept relates to each knowledge area.  If you want to build your fundamental knowledge of business analysis, understanding how each part relates to each knowledge area will be a great starting point.  It will help you to connect the dots of the BA skillset.

Requirements Life Cycle Management

SUMMARY

This chapter in BABOK v3 covers 15% to 20% of the certification test depending on which you are looking to take.  Like my previous blog, this chapter is a key knowledge area because the information determined is used throughout the project and in many other knowledge areas as inputs. 

PURPOSE

I believe the 5 tasks speak for this knowledge area quite well.

There are 5 tasks in the RLCM all of them relate to the requirements.

The tasks in RLCM are:

• Trace Requirements

• Maintain Requirements

• Prioritize Requirements

• Access Requirement Changes

• Approve Requirements

 What area with requirements do you think organizations see as the most beneficial?  (PLEASE COMMENT BELOW) Because I love process improvements and truly get joy out of making people’s jobs better, I lean towards Maintain requirements and Access Requirements Changes.  Accessing the requirements change requires you to look at and understand the impact of the change to both the process and the process downstream.  If you don’t fully understand how the change can impact the process downstream you may help one area and hinder another. 

 Stop back next week, I will be talking about Strategy Analysis!

 

1.       (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2015, pp. 75-98; International Institute of Business Analysis, 2015)

2.       (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2015, p. 75; International Institute of Business Analysis, 2015)

Bibliography

International Institute of Business Analysis. (2015). BABOK A GUIDE TO THE BUSINESS ANALYSIS BODY OF KNOWLEDGE (Vol. V3). Toronto, Ontario, Canada.: IIBA.