The Importance of Capturing the Vision of a Project: How a BRD Can Help
A step by step guide to the importance and process of creating a business requirement document
The vision of a project explains the strategic objectives of the clients or organization. It motivates the team and provides a target to work towards. It provides the team with an understanding of what the customer wants to achieve. The project's success majorly depends on clear articulation of the vision statement that is connected with business strategy. Before we begin a project, we want to capture its essence and record it to assure its success. This is where the idea of creating a Business Requirement Document (BRD) comes into play!
WHAT IS BRD?
A business requirements document (BRD) is a representation of a project's objectives and expectations. On a high level, it defines the objectives, justifications, rationale, stakeholders’ names, business elements, and intended business values of the project.
WHAT ARE ALL THE ASPECTS OF BUSINESS?
Business requirements comprise high-level project criteria that outline the organization’s business goals. The goal can be anything from increasing revenue to improving customer experience or simply meeting a compliance requirement. It can be simple or complex, it can involve updating a small UI update or complicated system changes involving cross-functional teams.
User requirements focus on user requirements. It specifies how the TO-BE process or system should generate value for the end users, i.e. customers, and employees. Generally, user requirements can be a child object under one or more business requirements.
Functional requirements represent the behaviour of the system in accordance with the business needs. This behaviour might be described as services, tasks, or functions that the system must do. This criterion aids in the integration of business and technology.
Non-functional requirements specify the macro properties of the solution. Non-functional requirements are often overlooked by business analysts. These criteria can be crucial to business sometimes and act as the ceiling for the IT team. Missing the non-functional requirements can lead to the failure of the entire project. Hence, it’s very important to pay extra attention to the last bits of requirements.
WHY BRD IS IMPORTANT?
Functional requirement documents (FRD) and Function Specification documents (FSD) are the major parts of the BRD. Gathering critical project information concisely and clearly is the objective behind a good BRD. It is important because BRD defines the project foundation, deliverables, and process map. There are several more advantages to creating and share BRD:
Gathering and elicitation of user needs
Getting project requirements approval from business stakeholders
Securing the budget from the project sponsors
Aligning the project requirement with high-level goals
Risk analysis, gap analysis and identifying the TO-BE process
Making it a centralised document for the project technical team
WHAT INFORMATION DOES BRD CONSIST OF?
While there is no fixed structure that a BRD needs to follow, it generally includes the following sections and topics:
Project Summary
It’s sometimes known as an executive summary. The project summary or executive summary should contain a high-level statement outlining the project and its purposes. It must set the tone for the entire document and project. It’s very helpful for people to understand the overview of the entire project just by reading this section.
Stakeholders’ Names
This section will identify all the project stakeholders, they are generally the people who are directly associated with the project and may be interested in reading the document. They may be the project sponsor, clients or end users, product owner, delivery manager, and development and QA team members who’ll be working on the requirements.
Objectives
Listing down business objectives that the project wants to achieve. It sets the tone of the project before we kick off the actual work. It helps the reader by giving a high-level overview of what the project will accomplish and how that supports the larger organizational goals and objectives. The project objectives must be written in such a way that should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound (SMART framework)
Project scope
This is a very important part of the project documents, which highlights the boundaries of a project. It helps the stakeholders to be on the same page and that prevents scope creep in later phase of the project or prevents the project to fall under the waterfall model. The project scope identifies and outlines explicit business goals as well as high-level project results.
Business requirements
In this section, the business analyst will go into further detail of the business requirements. One can set the priority of each of the business requirements, and that eventually identifies the MVPs of the project or product.
Business Process Model
The business process model can is displaying the business process on a flow chart. As a visual diagram is more engaging, this opens up opportunities for impactful stakeholders’ feedback. This can be high-level process flows or can be detail-oriented. A business process map also helps in doing gap analysis by identifying the AS-IS and TO-BE process models
User Stories
This defines the requirement from the end user's perspective. Here the actor is the end user and how they can be benefitted from the newly designed system. It’s generally written in meaningful language.
For example – “As a user, I want _________ So that it helps me in ___________”
RAID analysis
RAID analysis is a tool for identifying project Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies. RAID log can describe the assumptions and constraints of the project. This is important because it makes everyone aware of the important stuff and that the project isn’t impacted. This is also another way to receive support from the stakeholders and optimize resources. A RAID analysis can further be categorised based on the impact it can have on the project, i.e., high impact, medium impact and low impact.
Success Metrics
Defining the tangible outcomes, we’re expecting from the release of the project. To compare later whether the project release was able to achieve the expected outcomes!