Three Baby-Steps toward Agile Requirements Management

Kurt Solarte, Managing Consultant

If you are beginning to consider a move to more agile methods, you may be looking for a set of

‘best practices’ for agile requirements elicitation and agile requirements management. What you will

likely find is many prescriptive and detailed ‘best practices’ which I personally have found to be

situational at best, and often just too much to consume for an organisation new to the concepts. What I

propose to offer in this post is a few ‘baby steps’ that can help an organisation move toward an agile

environment and prepare for some of the more prescriptive methods like SCRUM or eXtreme

programming (XP).

When making a move toward agile methods, there are three main recommendations that I

believe should be considered to prepare for a more agile requirements practice, and a team as a whole.

1. Collaboration ─ While this is obviously a good idea in all methods of requirements

management and all stages of a project lifecycle, it is an essential element to agile methods

and agile requirements management.

2. Embrace Change ─ this is almost a counter intuitive step for many business analysts. To be

agile in requirements management, we must acknowledge change happens, embrace it, and

make it part of our process.

3. Support of upper management ─ Becoming agile is an organisational change as much as a

development practice, and without clear support from upper management this change will

be difficult; if not impossible.

Recommending good collaboration is a bit like recommending good work ethic; it seems as if it

should go without saying. However, for organisations used to a very siloed waterfall method, real

collaboration as a standard operating procedure may have fallen by the wayside. It can become easy in a

waterfall method to simply over-document deliverables and blindly send them to the next team. In an

agile method, an organisation will begin to keep ‘living documents’ that constantly change and grow ─

this requires true collaboration and teaming. In order to properly include all members of the project

team and stakeholders, an organisation must not only take on more inclusive methods, but must

educate all associated people on the use of the method, including management and stakeholders. If

one expects individuals to be involved, the individuals must know how, why, and when they are

expected be involved. Simply said, to create an inclusive method, all individuals associated with the

project must feel and be encouraged to be involved. One simple step many larger organisations have

found useful is the adoption of stakeholders’ terminology. Often in agile methods we get very focused

on the new names, terms, and roles ─ all at the detriment to collaboration. Many stakeholders will feel

more comfortable with requirements, time periods, and project roles being expressed in their own

terminology. This should be seen by the project team as a minor secession for the sake of greater

collaboration.

Embrace Change. To many Business Analysts and Project Managers, this will seem counter-

intuitive. As professional BAs and PMs we have been taught to identify all requirements and lock down

the scope. However, we all know change does happen, and what often defines the success of a project

is how we deal with that change. While traditionally an organisation would manage this change with

some sort of project or scope change management process; which gives a structure to altering

requirements which are typically fully elicited. In agile methods, organisations acknowledge that change

is constant in technology projects, and move to embrace that change. To make steps toward agility, an

organisation may need to change their requirements elicitation methods. The elicitation can begin with

very broad requirements that outline a general scope, do some high level requirements modelling,

prioritise what has been captured, and prepare the team to change as needed. Once the broad

requirements are documented and ranked, the team can then begin to add further detail to

requirements in an ordered fashion. This means the stakeholders will give detail as it is needed, and the

team will change documentation as details emerge. The stakeholders know their priorities and

requirements will change, and the project team knows the project documentation is ‘alive’ and changing

as the project moves on, and as the need for detail requires.

While the above detailed steps are important ways to ease into agile, arguably the most

necessary step is getting upper management support. The management lines for both the project teams

and the stakeholders must understand the use of agile methods is an organisational change, and not just

a development method. These management lines must fully comprehend the concepts behind

embracing change, increasing collaboration, and the notion of practicing constant requirements

prioritisation. As with many successful organisational changes, the use of ‘on the ground’ champions of

the new process are important, but a clear message of support by company leadership is imperative. A

project kick-off that includes an executive saying a few words of support for the new methods and

mentioning that management is watching for this to be a successful implementation, will go a long way

to drowning out the voices of the detractors.

As an organisation strives to become agile, it is important to remember to be agile in the

implementation of agile. Meaning, only take on as much agile process and change as your organisation

can handle in each ‘sprint’, or short change window; and only keep the agile processes needed to

improve implementation of technology projects. Organisations can often lose focus of their underlying

purpose for adopting agile methods, and begin to focus on ‘becoming agile’. There is not a prize or

reward that comes with completely adopting any particular agile method, so look to embrace the parts

of agile methods you need to find your success, and question anything else ─ because that is truly

becoming agile.