Creating a shared understanding of business requirements is like picturing a building instead of a pile of bricks. You cannot achieve it without organizing requirements in a structure that makes sense. More than that: how can you, a business analyst, feel confident that you’ve got it if it’s all piled up in no particular order?
Requirements can be structured in many ways: by themes and epics, by business use cases or capabilities, by functions or types of requirements – and more often using a combination of these. A sensible structure that makes grouping natural and requirements easy to find goes a long way to achieving shared understanding of requirements.
Organizing will also help you identify gaps and detect inconsistencies and duplication. Use case diagrams, scenario matrices and user experience storyboards provide frameworks to organize your analysis and create building blocks of the future solution.
And if you like mind maps, think how a mind map of a business problem can become a requirements map as you go.
But produce a 70-page document listing 289 requirements – and each reader can imagine a totally different building!
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