MASTERING THE REQUIREMENTS PROCESS: Build the Right Software – First Time 3 Day Seminar and Workshop	Endorsed by
Dates: 15-17 September 2008 Location: London To Book ONLINE Now, Click Here!   24-26 February 2009 Location: London To Book ONLINE Now, Click Here! Speaker: Suzanne Robertson, Atlantic Systems Guild

"Informative, practical, thought provoking. (Speaker was) knowledgeable, excellent communicator, able to make things real."
Iche Otonti, IT Consultant, Qiaow td

"The seminar was a mind opener for me. I started to use some of the seminar teachings the day after and I keep wondering at the enormous difference it makes in my daily job. For the first time in 20 years, I feel in control of client requirements and from there the full project lifecycle!"
Francois-Pierre Moriceau, IT Solutions Architect, Orange Business Services

"Suzanne's experience and enthusiasm was infectious!"
Eve Finney, Business Analyst, ING Direct

"Really well paced and easy to understand."
Peter Herring, Systems Analyst, Capstone Mortgage Services

"The flow followed that of the requirements process, was easy to relate to and follow."
Tom Jacobs, Business Analyst, Lloyds TSB

"Very informative, lots of relevant stories, very knowledgeable."
Emma Temple, Business Change Analyst, Capstone Mortgage Services

"Lively, knowledgeable, articulate – absolutely excellent."
Steve Coe, Requirements & Testing Manager, Department of Work & Pensions

"One of the best!"
Helena Bone, Senior Business Analyst, HBOS General Insurance

"Good theory, loaded up with solid practical experience. Excellently communicated and paced."
Ian James, Principal Consultant, Ordnance Survey

This material is useful for all stakeholders in a project, for example:

• Business Analysts
• Systems Analysts
• Project Leaders / Managers
• Systems Developers
• Requirements Managers
• Software Developers
• Software Engineers
• Consultants
• Product or Program Managers
• Users and Software Customers
• Requirements Engineers
• Programme Managers

This material applies to all stakeholders: users and customers will benefit from learning how to participate in this multi-disciplinary approach. It is for anybody who has a responsibility to deliver the right products - the ones that get used.

• Determine your client's needs—exactly
• Write requirements that are complete, traceable, and testable
• Precisely define the scope of the project
• Discover all the stakeholders—and keep them involved
• Use up-to-date techniques such as storyboarding and e-collaboration
• Get the requirements quickly, and incrementally
• Make use of the popular Volere Requirements template, process and techniques for discovering requirements

Requirements are the most misunderstood part of systems development, and yet the most crucial. Requirements must be correct if the rest of the development effort is to succeed. This workshop presents a complete process for eliciting the real requirements, testing them for correctness, and recording them clearly, comprehensibly and unambiguously.

Software development today has more demands on it than ever; and fewer resources to meet those demands. Getting the software right—the first time—is the most effective way to succeed under these circumstances. Today’s requirements process is incremental with quick cycle times. It uses prototypes and scenarios, and it ensures that your developers know precisely what you—and your customer—mean when you write a fit criterion – a concise test case for the requirement.

This workshop shows you how to precisely define the scope of the business problem, to discover and involve the appropriate stakeholders, to use techniques such as apprenticing and use case workshops to learn what the users really need, to write testable requirements, and to phase the requirements to allow incremental delivery of the product.

• The Requirements Process
An overview of the process for gathering and verifying requirements.

• Project Blastoff
This builds a foundation for the requirements project by establishing its Scope-Stakeholder-Goals. This gives you the precise scope of the business area to be studied; a testable goal for the project; and using stakeholder maps, you can identify all the sources of requirements. Additionally, the blastoff ensures the project is viable and worthwhile.

• Trawling for Requirements
At the core of any requirements process is the ability to get people to tell you what they really need, rather than their perceived solution, or what they think you might be able to deliver. We show you how to use apprenticing, use case workshops, interviewing, brainstorming, mind maps and other techniques to discover exactly what the customers need—and want.

• Functional Requirements
Functional requirements are those things the product must do. You discover them by understanding the work the user does, and determining what part of that work the automated product can best do. The resulting interaction between user and product is usually modeled with scenarios, and from these, you can readily derive the functional requirements.

• Non-functional Requirements
Non-functional requirements are properties the product must have, such as the desired look and feel, usability, performance, cultural aspects and so on. This section discusses the types of non-functional requirements, and shows you how to use the template, and other methods, to find the all-important qualitative requirements for your product.

• Managing Your Requirements
Requirements are the lynchpin of any development effort, and so have to be written correctly and managed effectively. This section demonstrates the use of a template to help you write requirements. It looks at requirements management issues like traceability, prioritization and conflicting requirements. We also look at tools to help manage requirements specifications.

• The Quality Gateway
Testing is most effective when it is done early in the development cycle. Here we demonstrate how to test requirements before they become part of the requirements specification. The Quality Gateway rejects out-of-scope, gold-plated, non-viable, incorrect and incomplete requirements. We show how you can attach an unambiguous fit criterion to a requirement. This makes the requirement testable, as well as ensuring the implemented solution precisely matches the customer’s expectations.

• Prototyping and Scenarios
Some requirements are not discovered until the user has the opportunity to use the product. Prototyping is a way of discovering requirements by testing mock-up products for the user’s work. Here we look at the merits of both low and high-fidelity prototypes, and how they and scenarios are used to discover previously-hidden requirements.

• Your Requirements Process
We look at how to make your own requirements process as effective and efficient as possible. For example, accelerating the requirements gathering by establishing the scope then building an early throwaway prototype before moving on to incremental delivery. Each part of the requirements process is examined so that participants can discuss problems and ideas related to their own situation, and how they can use the lessons from this course to improve their existing requirements process.

Seminar Features

• Your instructor has real-world experience, and is able (and willing) to call on years of experience when discussing your particular requirements issues.
• Your own copy of the acclaimed Mastering the Requirements Process, Second Edition by Suzanne and James Robertson, published by Addison Wesley.
• A copy of the Volere Requirements Specification Template. This complete template provides the foundation for your own requirements specifications.
• A complete version of the Volere Requirements Process. This guides you through the intricacies of requirements gathering. Frequently asked questions about the Volere can be found on http://www.volere.co.uk/faq.htm
• Guidance on tools currently available to assist requirements capture and recording.
• References to books and sources of up-to-date requirements engineering techniques
• A final session where, through discussions, interaction and demonstrations, you can ensure you have a requirements process suitable for your organization.

Workshops

We want you to use this right away. Each of the teaching chapters is reinforced with a workshop where you apply the concepts presented in the seminar. Participants work in teams to discover, specify and evaluate requirements for a significant system by:

• Defining the project’s scope, its goals and the relevant stakeholders
• Identifying business use cases and product use cases
• Prototyping the product to find hidden requirements
• Applying the requirements specification template
• Defining functional and non-functional requirements
• Deriving the fit criterion, or measurement, for the requirements

This course has been endorsed by The International Institute of Business Analysts. As such, this course has been approved as being aligned to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) and hence are recommended training for business analysts who wish to sit the exam to become Certified Business Analysis Professionals (CBAP). For further information on how to register for the CBAP examination please refer to certification at www.theiiba.org.

Descriptions and Ordering from AMAZON

Along with the seminar materials, delegates will receive a FREE copy of Mastering the Requirements Process book—Second Edition by James and Suzanne Robertson. ISBN: 0321419499. Publisher Addison-Wesley Professional.

	Suzanne Robertson Suzanne Robertson is co-author of Mastering the Requirements Process, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley 2006) a book that provides guidance on finding requirements and writing them so that all the stakeholders can understand them. Her other requirements book, Requirements-Led Project Management (Addison-Wesley 2005) addresses how to use requirements as input to planning and management. She is also co-author of the Volere approach to requirements engineering. She has more than 30 years experience in systems specification and building. Her courses on requirements, systems analysis, design and problem solving are well known for their innovative workshops and practical applicability. Current work includes research and consulting on finding and involving the right stakeholders, the building of requirements knowledge models and running audits for assessing requirements specifications. She is a principal and founder of The Atlantic Systems Guild and is founding editor of the Requirements column in IEEE Software magazine.
	James Robertson James Robertson is a consultant, teacher, author, project leader whose area of concern is the requirements for products, and the contribution that good requirements make to successful projects. James is a leading proponent of the principle of introducing creativity into the requirements process. His controversial article “Eureka: Why Analysts Should Invent Requirements” in IEEE Software has provoked heated discussion and has been widely quoted. Before becoming a systems engineer, James trained as an architect and his experience in that profession provides inspiration for his work on innovation and creativity. He is co-author of Mastering the Requirements Process, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley 2006), Requirements-Led Project Management (Addison-Wesley 2005) and the Volere approach to requirements engineering. He is also a principal and founder of The Atlantic Systems Guild, a think tank known for its research into new systems engineering techniques.

Business & Systems Analysis Series

Enterprise Level Business Process Management
9-10 March 2009, London

Business Process Modelling Analysis & Design
3-5 December 2008, 11-13 March 2009, London

Mastering the Requirements Process
15-17 September 2008, 24-26 February 2009, London

Business Rules: From A to Z
18-19 September 2008, 19-20 February 2009, London

SERIES DISCOUNTS
Attend more than one course in this series and you will be entitled to the following discounts:

2nd course 10%
3rd Course 15%
4th Course 20%

Group Booking Discounts
If 5 delegates from the same organisation register at the same time for the same or various seminars, then the 5th delegate is free. We regret that this offer cannot be used in conjunction with the Series Discount.

£1395 + VAT (£244.13) = £1639.13

15-17 September 2008
Venue: myhotel Chelsea, 35 Ixworth Place, London, SW3 3QX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7225 7500
Fax: +44 (0)20 7225 7555
Website: http://www.myhotels.com/default.asp?section=10&page=1509

24-26 February 2009
Venue: myhotel Chelsea, 35 Ixworth Place, London, SW3 3QX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7225 7500
Fax: +44 (0)20 7225 7555
Website: http://www.myhotels.com/default.asp?section=10&page=1509

IRM UK in association with JP Events Ltd has arranged special discounted rates at all venues and at other hotels nearby the venue. Please visit the JP Events website for further information.
E-mail: enquiries@jpeventsltd.com Tel +44 (0)20 7428 9911 Fax +44 (0)20 7428 9966.

For an in-house presentation of this or any other IRM UK seminar, please e-mail jeanette.hall@irmuk.co.uk or call +44 (0)20 8866 8366.

© Copyright IRM UK Strategic IT Training, Bishops Walk House, High Street, Pinner HA5 5PJ UK, Tel +44 (0)20 8866 8366, Fax +44 (0)20 8866 7966, enquiries@irmuk.co.uk, www.irmuk.co.uk.