What are Requirements?

Requirements are a mechanism to enable design; they represent the terms of reference of the design.

Typically, when a business area has a business problem it wants to solve, it will request a particular solution by name – likely a state of the art IT system that they know other successful companies are using.

There are two problems with this:

• The first is one of human nature. Nobody walks into the Apple Store to ask for the most cost-effective solution for storing and accessing music and photos, from which they can access the internet at appropriate speeds, capture and share videos and monitor their calorie consumption whilst they’re doing it – and then attends workshops to unpack how many songs and photos they have, how many they’re likely to have, and their typical travel habits. They ask for the latest iPhone, because they’ve seen the adverts, watched the Keynote, caressed its sleek engineering with their own hands in the display area, and had their human desires invoked by a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign.

A consumer has every right to buy whatever they like with their hard-earned income, but in an enterprise, a solution in one area of the business is likely to require a further solution in another – and either a significant increase in the scope of the project, or a further project to deliver it. 

This creates a ‘footprint’ of the change in the business.

For example, a new feature on the website might require more people in Customer Services to answer the additional questions from customers trying to get acclimatised to it; and Customer Services might in turn require a piece of software that enables contacts to be distributed across sites to cater for it. One of those sites might be outside the EU, so a privacy impact assessment is required, and that in turn means changes to the contracts, which impacts the Procurement function; so…

• The second is one of perspective. Since the business area is only really concerned with factors within their direct accountability, in order to allow an organisation to stay in balance, we articulate the business needs as requirements which allows specialised solution designers with a broader perspective to solve the business problem holistically – as far as possible, keeping cost, risk, impact and everything else in balance.

For this reason, a business analyst must understand the ‘needs’ behind the ‘wants’ – the requirement behind the solution idea. And the best way to do this is to understand how the business area operates in relation to the business problem, how it wishes to operate with the solution, and what the desired outcome looks like in situ.

This, in turn, enables a business analyst to identify the changes to people, process and technology necessary to ensure the solution achieves the desired benefits – and, as far as possible, take the risk out of the change.