Here are 5 stages for producing an effective set of business and system requirements for an ECM-related program. It’s important that you have the scope well-defined (and agreed on) AND documented with the project sponsor and stakeholders before you start the process outlined below.
 
1. Plan the Required Work. First, you must understand and list all the activities that will need to be undertaken to produce the requirement. This will include planning in dates for conducting interviews and workshops as well as estimating the time it will take to analyze and document the requirements. Allow sufficient time to obtain consensus and agreement; this can take more time than one would expect.

2. Gather Requirements. What do your key stakeholders and users need the system to do? There are various workshop and interview techniques to help in this activity (a What Works topic for another day).

3. Analyze Requirements. After gathering an initial set of requirements you need to analyze and understand them. The business analysis team needs to formulate and articulate the final ECM vision (where you want to get to) in terms that stakeholders can understand. During this stage, the analysis team will have to help the key stakeholders prioritize the requirements.

4. Document Requirements. Now it’s time to produce an initial version of your requirements document. A useful starting point is to base the document on a standard set of requirements (for example MoReq2). Documentation of the requirements is a powerful tool to help achieve consensus to the end-state solution.

5. Agree on Requirements. Finally, and before starting your initiative, it’s time to agree on your document requirements. This will involve obtaining some kind of sign-off authority from each of the key stakeholders.

Keep in mind that this can be an extensive process that, while simple in concept, can take a lot of time, thought, and effort. Each of these individual stages can be iterative in themselves, with several passes required at each stage. As you plan, you may realize that you might need to revisit Stage 2 to gather additional requirements, which, in turn, will lead to re-analyzing those requirements.

While no plan is perfect, and you may need to fine-tune your plan during roll-out, creating a requirements document will provide a firm foundation to your project’s success.

Want to learn more about analyzing and defining your requirements? AIIM’s ECM Specialist training programs provide more detail.

Atle Skjekkeland is vice president of AIIM and leads AIIM’s training programs. Follow him on Twitter: @skjekkeland.