Requirements Life cycle Management

Requirement Life Cycle Management Knowledge area describes the tasks that business analysts perform in order to manage and maintain requirements and design information from inception to retirement. The purpose of the Requirement Life Cycle Management is to ensure that business, stakeholders, and solution requirements and designs are aligned with one another and that the solution implements them.

The requirement life cycle –

Begins with the representation of business need as a requirement
Continues through the development of a solution and
Ends when a solution and the requirements that represent it
Access to reliable, well-organized, and connected data is critical to the success of any project.
It’s all about having accurate and consistent business analysis information in the Requirements Life Cycle Management knowledge domain.

Knowledge Area Structure

The BABOK Guide V3 breaks down the activities of requirements life cycle management into a set of tasks. Let’s take a look at each activity in turn and explore how it contributes to the management of requirements and designs.

1. Trace Requirements

The goal of this task is to establish connections between requirements and designs at various levels.
This assignment makes ensuring that the requirements and designs are in harmony.
You select which traces are important to your project and how much value they add.
Setting up and maintaining traceability is costly labour that must be justified.
A regulator may impose traceability in highly regulated sectors (e.g., healthcare).

2. Maintain Requirements

Throughout their entire cycle, the requirements and designs must remain correct and consistent. This implies that as a Business Analyst, you must keep track of requirements, designs, and characteristics to ensure that they accurately reflect the current stage of the effort.
You may also see if requirements can be reused (to speed up the requirements creation process) or try to generate a list of reusable needs for future projects.

3. Prioritize Requirements

The goal of this task is to rate the needs in order of significance. It necessitates an understanding of the important stakeholders who should include in the prioritizing process.
Priority is a measure of relative significance, thus as a Business Analyst, you must understand which aspects are most important: consider benefit, cost, risk, and reliance.
These aspects must also be understood and agreed upon by the relevant players.
Additionally, you will be in charge of resolving stakeholder problems and ensuring that all parties are on the same page.

4. Assess Requirements Changes

This task entails assessing the consequences of a proposed change. You compare the modification to the project’s overall goals.
You explain, for example,
- how this modification affects the business value.
- What is the time impact?
- What is the financial impact?
You can choose to be more or less formal about change management depending on the business analysis methodology.
Nonetheless, answers to these questions are required, and this work ensures that stakeholders are aware of and understand the change’s implications.

5. Approve Requirements

You acquire agreements and approvals on needs and designs when you complete this activity.
To do this work, you must first understand the responsibilities of stakeholders and their levels of authority. You’ll reach an agreement on approvals and resolve any disputes that may emerge as a result of stakeholder differences.
Finally, you’ll inform the remaining stakeholders who didn’t participate in the approval process about the approvals.