Requirements Engineering - A Key Skill for Business Analysis Professionals?
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As business analysis professionals, our daily work is mainly about people, their visions, problems, needs, and requirements – but also about their fears and concerns regarding change, transformation and disruption. So, one major capability of a good business analysis professional is the ability to actively listen to people, to understand their needs, to see through other people’s eyes, to understand their problems and fears, etc.
Besides that, a variety of ‘hard’ skills – including strategy analysis, analytical work, business processes, elicitation and collaboration, and requirements work are essential for a business analysis professional in order to come up with a solution that meets business goals but also the people involved and affected.
This is exactly where Requirements Engineering skills come into play. According to IREB’s CPRE glossary Requirements Engineering is defined as: “The systematic and disciplined approach to the specification and management of requirements with the goal of understanding the stakeholders’ desires and needs and minimizing the risk of delivering a system that does not meet the desires and needs.”
Even though this is quite a comprehensive definition - it only gives a rough overview of what Requirements Engineering is all about and why we believe it is a key skill for any business analyst.
In my practical experience, when working in different roles and projects with people from business and IT, the essence of Requirements Engineering is about:
- Finding the right stakeholders
- Identifying the right requirements
- Validating requirements together with the stakeholders
- Uncovering and resolving conflicts
- Creating a shared understanding
- Proper mediation between IT and business
- Finding the right level of formality and detail in a given situation
- Establish traceability between requirements and other work products
- And finally, managing requirements and change during the entire endeavour
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Requirements Engineering & Business Analysis
Wed, Jul 5, 2023, 10:30 AM ET
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About The Author:
Stan Bühne is the Managing Director of the IREB GmbH. Prior to this, he worked for 15 years in IT consulting, where he gained extensive experience in planning and implementing digital transformation projects with international project teams. As a practical expert in requirements engineering, he has contributed to the development of CPRE certifications and is co-author of the Handbook Requirements Management according to IREB Standard. His main focus is on the following topics: Requirements Engineering, Customer Experience, Business Analysis and Project Management.
