Business Requirements Workshop

What to Expect

In a Business Requirements Workshop, 729 Solutions will walk you through a series of questions, exercises, interviews, and worksheets to create a powerful and thorough Business Requirements document that clearly outlines your current digital needs and the methodology by which 729 Solutions can help you achieve these goals. This process can be extra helpful in helping to discover the full scope of a large project, and identifying where to focus effort in order to achieve maximum results.

This Workshop will draw on previously submitted documentation and will allow us to highlight any places where additional information may be required. The Business Requirements Workshop is a critical step in developing the Business Requirements document that will guide our team in taking your project from start to finish.

Part 1 – Educate

In the first part of our Business Requirements Workshop we’ll focus on the project overview, outlining key requirements and expected deliverables.

Part 2 – Explore

Next we’ll explore the current solutions that you’re using, highlighting both technical and design solutions. We’ll document what’s currently working, and what could use some improvements.

Part 3 – Reveal

We’ll wrap up this workshop by talking through any project constraints, as well as establishing the vision for what success looks like.

Educate

We’ll begin your Business Requirements Workshop with a quick round of introductions before jumping into outlining the project overview. We’ll establish the summary of your project, including what your company does overall and what you hope to achieve by working with 729 Solutions. One of our favorite questions to ask is “Why are you doing this project now?”, as it helps identify events that triggered the start of the project, and can provide additional clarity into determining the final outcome of the project.

Next, we’ll run through both the functional and non-functional requirements for your project. Functional requirements will outline exactly what the end product needs to do.

This might include tasks such as:

• Gather and utilize data from a variety of sources
• Provide customer service support through different channels such as chat, text, email, and voice
• Create customer enabled control with an easy to use customer account
• Improve internal visibility for team members to see and interact with customer profiles
• Return an output to a specific channel or document

Non-functional requirements will focus more on the bigger picture of how you want your clients to feel after using your product or interacting with your website.

We’ll ask questions to help you identify the overall vibe you’re looking for, such as:

• What kind of customer experience do you want to provide?
• What makes a great customer experience?
• What kind of additional value will this project bring to your company? Exposure? Marketing?
• What additions (or deletions) would improve the customer experience?
• How do you want to prepare for future advancements and changes in your product or other service offers?
• What impact could this completed project have on your company as a whole?

We’ll wrap up this section with a review of the expected deliverables from 729 Solutions. In addition to the final Business Requirements Document, we’ll list the various aspects of your project and what the deliverables are for each.

Aspects that might come up include:

• Technical stack overview
• User and customer experience
• Accessibility and inclusion guidance
• Sitemaps
• Website templates, wireframes, and mockups
• System integrations
• Additional Front End or Back End development work

Explore

Next, we’ll begin to explore the solutions that you’re already using. This section may be more technical and detail-oriented in nature as we discuss architecture, integrations, user experience, and design.

We’ll start with a review of your Full Stack architecture. Having your full architecture diagram available can make this process move more smoothly. Starting with the Back End, we’ll review your current servers, apps, and databases. It will be important to note any industry-specific or regulatory security needs, in addition to reviewing basic user privacy and compliance.

Then we’ll move on to Front End architecture. First, we’ll review your current sitemap, and make note of any issues that you’re already aware of. If you’re already using a component library we’ll review that, and if not we’ll discuss if it is a good solution for you.

Starting with the information from your sitemap we’ll move onto reviewing your current user personas and user journeys. We’ll also start the discussion on how we can use wireframes and mockups in your specific project to improve your users’ experiences. We’ll also review your site for accessibility and inclusion, and begin discussing any suggested improvements. Branding, style guides, and user testing are also items that will be included in any front-facing project.

If your project is front-facing only, our 729 Studios team will use their refined process to keep the Business Requirements process running smoothly. Our process focuses on everything from the user journey to the content itself.

For some projects, we use internal discussions with your team to identify any current areas of success, as well as pain points for their department.

Departments that we might want to connect with include:

• Marketing
• Brand Identity
• IT
• Ticketing
• Ecommerce
• Mobile and Apps
• Digital Assets
• Public Relations
• Regulatory Compliance and Audits
• Security and Privacy
• Financial or Accounting
• Records and Archives
• Customer Service and Support

Reveal

In the final section, we’ll wrap up with a discussion on any project constraints before ending by confirming the shared vision for your project. We want to make sure we’re all on the same page for what the negotiables, non-negotiables, and absolute failure points are for your project. This will help everyone on both your team and our team be clear on the project priorities, as well as a clear definition of the “must-haves.”

We will also discuss how success will be measured for this project. Our team will have a list of suggested KPIs based on their initial understanding of the project, but we’ll want to know any other measurements of success that your primary stakeholder is looking for.

Finally, we’ll take a step back and talk about the overall vision and mission of the project. Most projects we work on have a lot of technical details and moving parts. As such, we find it useful to regularly review the project vision to make sure everyone is still working towards achieving the same goal. Keeping the actual project mission forefront in our minds ensures we’re always thinking about the technical details in the appropriate context.

After our Business Requirements Workshop, our 729 Solutions team will return to our coffee cups and get to work! As we begin to build this document, be sure that you’re sending in any additional documents, charts, lists, reports, or other things that were requested during the workshop.

The specific content of each Business Requirements document will vary greatly based on individual projects, but most will include all or some of the following:

• Project summary and overview
• Current environment assessment and systems overview
• Research and data
• Current user experience
• Project constraints
• What does success look like?
• Project schedule
• Project budget
• Terms and definitions
• Available documentation
• Project stakeholders and team members
• 729 Solutions team members
• Additional observations our team made during the process

Prepare for your Business Requirements Workshop

To help your Business Requirements Workshop run smoothly there are a few things we ask our clients to do ahead of time. Adequately preparing for each session means that we can focus our time together on actually understanding and creating your Business Requirements document. Sending us any documentation you have on your company and project ahead of time will allow our team to get a jump start on fully comprehending your project.

Helpful documents may include:

• Architecture and sitemap diagrams
• User journey flow charts
• Company mission and vision statements
• Company organizational chart
• Established brand and style guides
• Existing workflows
• SEO reports
• Google Analytics reports
• Customer interviews or reviews

Next Steps

Now that you understand how 729 Solutions can help you create a Business Requirements document, it’s time to reach out to one of our team members and get the process started. We’ll begin with a brief conversation to discuss your project and determine what the best next step is for your specific needs. We may suggest specific 729 Solutions workshops or services or schedule an in-depth scoping call. Our team will work with you to ensure you’re getting the services and solutions you need for whatever your current project is.