Mindspan Systems - Methodology Overview

The high level tasks involved in the business requirements definition phase of the project are:

	Defining project charter
	Conducting requirements capturing sessions with user groups
	Creating business requirement specifications document
	Reviewing and validating requirements

The purpose of a project charter is to clearly define project objectives and governing parameters, and get all stake-holders to agree on them. Project Charter is a concise and crisp document outlining the following:

	Project background (current situation)
	Project objectives (a clear statement of desired results)
	Project deliverables
	Project entities and roles (who'll specify requirements, who'll review deliverables, etc.)
	Critical success factors
	Any constraints and limitations

Project charter is defined based on discussion with and inputs from the project sponsor(s) in the client organization.

A series of well planned and structured requirements capturing discussions are held with the business users. Typically these sessions are conducted by a team of two business analysts from Mindspan, one of whom plays the role of facilitator and the other captures the discussion outputs in pre-designed templates. The participants from the client company are the user group representatives who know the business processes to be covered and problems to be solved. The facilitator and recorder use effective and interactive methods and techniques to elicit the real needs of the affected business groups. The focus is kept on business processes (the what part) without any consideration for the technical design or implementation approach (the how part).

Business analysts at Mindspan are trained specifically to conduct requirements capturing sessions, and have conducted such workshops with user groups of diverse backgrounds and responsibility levels across various industries.

Once the requirement capturing sessions are completed, Mindspan business analysts organize all the gathered information in the form of a business requirements specification (BRS) document. Among other details, the BRS document identifies and describes the following:

	Business processes, including triggering events and work-flows
	Organizational groups and roles involved in the business processes
	External entities and systems involved in business processes
	Business objects and their relationships with each other

Effective diagramming and narrative techniques are used to capture the business processes completely and accurately. The BRS document not only defines the business processes in detail but also clearly identifies processes (or their parts) to be automated by the proposed software solution, thus leading to the scope definition for the software application(s) to be developed.
Through years of applying our methodology for a variety of clients, Mindspan has evolved a set of standard templates for the BRS documents suitable for different kinds of applications.

The format, content and language of the BRS document are business user friendly, because they review the document and endorse it. The document may go through a couple of iterations of review and refinement before being finalized. An approved BRS document defines the scope of the software application to be developed, serves as a basis for reliable estimation of the project size, and is the main input to the design phase of the project. Once the BRS document is ready, the client may choose to follow Mindspan’s methodology for the subsequent phases of the project, or follow another path of its choice. The BRS document delivered by Mindspan lends itself to functional and technical design of the application using any industry standard approach, such as OOAD, UML, SSAD, or a custom-tailored approach used as a standard in the client organization.