Strategic Requirements Analysis: From Interviews to Models

A strategic requirement is something an organisation sets out to achieve; it could be the long-term vision the organisation sets itself, the key business condition for a specific project to be a success or a business strategy to achieve a goal. A set of strategic requirements defines the goals, strategies and tactics that organisations need to put in place to give them direction and impetus. Business analysts and consultants have to understand strategic requirements to know where projects can deliver business benefits and where not. The ability of the analyst to interview, gather, analyse, model and present strategic requirements is key to success. The primary tool consultants and business analysts use for communication is talking; but, if you cannot present all that incredible information back to your client effectively, it is hard for them and you to get to grips quickly enough with what is going on. Being able to present a model is really powerful because it provides a visual format and structure on one page to reason about those strategic requirements. Dr Karl A. Cox offers a process, guidelines and ideas - that have been tried and tested in practice - for conducting interviews and shows you how to rapidly turn interview findings into strategic requirements models all on one page, to present to your clients, customers, team and / or supervisors.

Karl A. Cox, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics. He has taught business-IT alignment to undergraduates and postgraduates for over 10 years and has published over 80 articles and book chapters on the subject of IT and business requirements, alignment, processes and project management. Karl has also consulted to companies in the UK, Australia and Japan. He owned a consulting business in Australia specialising in business-IT alignment, and was a senior research scientist at NICTA, Ltd, in Australia. Whilst there, his focus was on the commercial development of methods to improve business-IT alignment, as well as conduct consulting and research engagements with companies across Australia and in Japan.