An Overview of Organizing Requirements

The voluminous amounts of information that an analyst collects during the discovery and elicitation phases warrant a good deal of planning and organization in order to make business or user requirements into a usable, cohesive whole. As with any other organization process, the key element to requirements’ organization success is thorough preparation and planning.

What are the criteria for organized requirements?

According to BABOK 2.0, an analyst has two main objectives when organizing requirements: (1) to understand which models are appropriate to include based on the business need, and (2) to understand and clearly communicate the interdependencies and relationships between the various requirements.1 Whatever model an analyst determines to be appropriate, it must be consistent with established models the rest of her department is using. Standards will enable an analyst to present a cohesive, easily understandable system and structure to stakeholders. Additionally, an analyst must execute a method that will illuminate requirements prioritization and inter-relationships. This will enable her to organize requirements for the project at hand.

Establishing requirements organization standards

To quote BABOK, strong requirements will “follow organizational standards [that] will be used consistently on projects. If no standard exists, the business analyst must select an appropriate set of techniques.”2 Therefore, if standards have not been thoroughly documented, together with her colleagues, an analyst should create them. The following preliminary steps are helpful when organizing requirements for a department or organization.