Is there confusion in your project team about business requirements and technical specifications? Does your customer tell you what the solution is and get impatient when you ask what the business problem is? Does your project development methodology list documents with confusing names? Does the notion of seeking success criteria make you want to run away screaming? In this session we will look at why the document names are confusing. We will walk through the process of developing the technical specification from a single business requirement, “I want a nice cup of hot, strong coffee.” The desired outcome of this presentation is for you to understand the difference between a requirement and a specification, understand the relationship between them, and feel confident about where to document them.
Learning Objectives:
- The evolution of a technical specification from a business requirement
- The role of success criteria and metrics in the evolution of a requirement
- The truth about separating requirements and specifications in documentation
Skill Level: For Everyone
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Cecilie Hoffman, B.A., M.A. Linguistics,
Sr. Principal IT Business Analyst
Symantec Corporation
Cecilie’s professional passion is to educate technical and business teams about the role of the business analyst, and to empower the business analysts themselves with tools, methods, strategies and confidence.
Since the early 1980’s, Cecilie has worked in a variety of roles in the software industry. At a high-tech start-up company she realized that she was not going to find happiness as a developer. After stints as technical support to Sales, software  application trainer and curriculum designer, she was promoted to the position of Senior Knowledge Engineer; this position acknowledged her advocacy for both the customer and the engineer.
Cecilie’s career reflects the volatile nature of Silicon Valley; she has seen two full cycles of boom and bust. When the venture capital for high-tech dried up in the late 1980’s, she worked as a research analyst in the MIS/IT group of DHL Airways. Reporting to the IT Architect, Cecilie experienced the challenges of an international company trying to completely re-architect its business information systems.
As the economy in Silicon Valley recovered, Cecilie entered the world of sales and account management. For about six years she worked for a small consulting company and wore four hats on a daily basis: account manager, first-line manager, project manager, and business process analyst.
After seeing companies fail over and over again to realize their objectives on small development projects, Cecilie decided to run her own consulting company. Staggering under the weight of the delusion of “understanding business”, her company lasted twenty months before she accepted the truth (she’s not cut out to run a company) and returned to the life of working for someone else.
The consulting world lasted about one more year before the “dot com” bust of 2000 wiped out consulting funds. Cecilie went back to UC Santa Cruz and earned a Project and Program management certification. She also took a few database classes which re-affirmed her suspicion that she would not find happiness in life as a data analyst.
Ironically the P/PM certification led to the Business Analyst position at Symantec. She’s sure she got the job because the hiring manager learned that she had done a work-breakdown structure to determine how to gather requirements for a project to manage a team entry in a motorcycle endurance race.
She is happiest when her intuitive analysis-synthesis skills are harnessed to solve Gordian knot problems, and there are a few cats to herd in the process. She gets cranky when she hasn’t been able to ride either her street or dirt motorcycles for more than a week. Her dream is to ride from Istanbul, Turkey to Xian, China through the countries that were part of the ancient Silk Road.
Cecilie is a founding member of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) professionals. http://siliconvalley.theiiba.org |
