Business requirements

What are business requirements?

Business requirements are the changes in work activities and work practices, usually including the introduction of new information systems and/or services, to help the organisation achieve its aims and objectives. They will often require new or radically updated workspace. These requirements are identified by:

• analysing the business or business area to establish its key objectives and what needs to change in order to achieve those objectives
• determining what information is needed to support the organisation's business activities and to measure its performance
• defining the requirements for change at a high level
• defining and quantifying the benefits of the proposed changes
• identifying opportunities for providing new products and services.
  

Why are they important?

If your organisation is planning for new ways of working, such as electronic service delivery, you will almost certainly be working with others across organisational boundaries. You need to be able to think creatively about how the business could deliver its services rather than just aiming to improve existing arrangements. You also need to consider the challenges of Modernising Government. A future business model will probably involve the redesign or elimination of current processes, or a change in direction and the introduction of new processes. Analysis of business requirements enables you to position the business for the future through development of a business architecture - the processes that will enable you to achieve your business objectives; the people, the technology and organisational structures to make it happen. (See Programme management).

Business analysis techniques will help you to think in new ways; the outputs from a business analysis exercise are an essential prerequisite for requirements specifications (see Procurement) and for system development (see Requirements definition). They are a fundamental part of strategy formulation (see Business and supporting strategies).

Key factors for success

• Focus on business requirements, not user requirements
• Identify 'quick wins' through early implementation
• Test assumptions and validate sources.
  

Who is involved?

Business requirements are owned and led by the business. The people specifying high level requirements must have strong skills and expertise in business thinking; they may be internal staff, consultants or a mixed team. There will also be input from strategic planners and stakeholders in the business, such as partners from organisations contributing to shared electronic service delivery. Where there are partnership arrangements with providers they might also be involved.

Programme management teams carry out the implementation of new ways of doing things, as part of programmes of business change.

Principles

There are several well-established approaches to modelling business activity that can be used to produce a Business Activity Model. You may find it useful to combine techniques to allow you the maximum opportunity to think through possibilities in new ways.

Concepts

• Business perspectives - why the business is doing what it does: when developing services and systems to support business activities, it can be assumed that everyone within the business shares a belief about the basic function of the business. A business perspective is a particular slant on this shared belief. The shared belief can be assumed, but there will be different views about the overall objectives required in order to make the business function in accord with the belief. The stated business perspectives will help to identify what factors will be important in ensuring the success of the business (critical success factors). Some critical success factors will be specific to the business area being modelled, others may be inherited from higher-level analysis and planning activities.

• Business activities - what is done: business activity does not exist in isolation. It is embedded in an environment - the outside world and, perhaps, other parts of the same business - with which it must interact. Business activity is activity directed to some explicit purpose, such as collecting tax revenue, treating patients, providing social security benefits. This explicit purpose can be called the primary task. There must be 'doing' activities - essential parts of the primary task. There must also be enabling activities, which ensure that the resources and facilities needed by the doing activities are available. The doing and enabling activities must be planned. Activities to define rules will be part of the planning activities. Planning activities also include setting performance expectations. Planning, enabling and doing activities are monitored, and performance data is collected for comparison with expectations. Planning, enabling, doing and monitoring activities are all controlled. Control activities act on other activities when performance expectations are not met. Consequently, they may require changes in what is monitored.

• Business events - when activity is done: business activities are triggered by business events. Business events are of three types:

external inputs - inputs from outside the organisation's boundary.

decisions made in business activities within the organisation

scheduled points in time such as start of working day

A business event may trigger more than one activity. An activity may be triggered by more than one business event. Also, it is often possible to identify a set of business events and business activities which represent a 'business thread'. A business thread can be recognised as the path through a set of business activities which are the outcome of an initiating business event. A thread does not need to be continuous in its progression, but may need further business events to trigger later business activities.

• Business Rules - how activities are done: for many activities there are explicit rules for how activities are done. Rules are of two types - constraints and operational guidance. Constraints define conditions under which an activity cannot be done or conditions under which an activity must be done. Operational guidance determines how activities are done. It does not have to be defined procedurally.

 

Processes

Defining the agenda for change: what do you want to be able to do?

You should look at the strategic requirements and constraints as set out in your business and IS strategy, asking the following questions:

• which things are key to the business? what do we have to do to deliver our services well?
• what behaviours/attitudes/culture will ensure that performance targets are met?

Translate the answers to these questions into objectives and measures (so you know where you are trying to go and can check that you have got there)

You must have a good understanding of the business - its inputs and outputs; how its processes achieve the transformation , with its current capabilities and operations. You will also need to understand the organisation's workspace and IT and how well they currently support the business. Questions include:

• who do we do business with?
• how do we do business?
• how do we communicate with our customers?
• where is value added in our current processes?
• who is involved in our supply chain?
• who must we/should we work with to deliver services?

An important consideration is information and knowledge management - how will you achieve an integrated, coherent back office?

Identifying new ways of doing things
Your primary question is: can the fundamental characteristics of the business and its core processes be changed?

Business analysis is a useful set of techniques for analysing the business and its needs and how those might be addressed. It helps you to gain a full understanding of the current and future business of your organisation, the way in which its business has been - and could be - conducted and of the imperatives and constraints acting upon it. It is particularly valuable when used to clarify what may be complex real-world situations in which organisations collaborate and share processes for new forms of service delivery. Business analysis contributes to innovative thinking about the business, its relationships with partners and customers and the scope for better ways of delivering services.

Radical questions should be asked:

• what is the single biggest constraint and how could it be removed?
• how could technology be used to change the way we we do things?
• what tasks could we get our customers to do?
• what tasks could we get our partners and suppliers to do?
• what alternatives are there to the current delivery channel?

Business requirements involve four key components: workspace, people, technology and information, as outlined below.

The people aspects
The people aspects and cultural issues will need to be addressed, which include changes in:

• organisational structures: options: specialist/generalist; teams/individuals etc
• job roles: logical grouping of tasks; management roles; how these fit together; skills, capabilities etc
• reward systems, performance measures and career paths
• training and development
• terms and conditions.

You may need to develop new capabilities, either by recruiting new people or through programmes of training and development (bringing in and bringing on); see Skills and competencies.

The technology aspects
You will need to define your IS architecture, within the constraints set out your existing IS strategy (see Business and supporting strategies). It sets out various technologies to support new processes and helps to identify individual development areas needed to build new IT capability; it should also help you to rationalise your existing IT.

The information aspects
You will need to identify your information requirements to support new processes:

• what information is needed?
• what has to be done to it?
• how is it accessed, transferred and stored/shared?
• what validation is required?

The context of the business's information requirements must be taken into account, especially key assumptions and existing planning decisions. (See Information management for more detail.)

Deployment of new processes
Key activities for 'going live' are testing, preparation, rollout and refinement once new operations are in place. You are ensuring that appropriate capabilities for new processes can work in combination. You must also ensure that you can maintain existing services while new ones get underway . Your final testing activities are checking the individual areas of new processes, user testing and business testing.

Programme management provides the structure for successful deployment of business change, realisation of benefits and ongoing refinement and improvement.

Performance targets and measures
An essential part of defining high level requirements is to demonstrate clear linkages between key objectives, requirements and intended outcomes, with appropriate measures for progress against targets (see D2: Performance).

See also the Requirements Management workbook for a more detailed step-by-step approach to this topic.

Further information:

See the briefing on programme management; detailed guidance on translating requirements into programmes of change, see the publication Managing Successful Programmes

OGC supports, co-ordinates and monitors the public sector in delivering the Government's target of achieving £21.5 billion efficiency gains a year by 2007/08, see the main  OGC website for further details.