Know How to Define Customer Solution Requirements!
In business analysis, there are 2 types of customer solution requirements—functional and non-functional. The former specifies what a solution is designed to function, while the latter pertains to the additional operational, technical and performance requirements for the implementation and support of the solution. To understand clearly the area where the customer issue exists, you should identify first the requirements before you devise a solution, describing its functionality and capabilities. So, how can you do this?
Use a Vision Statement
One of the most important solution requirements is a vision statement, which emphasizes the functional relation between the components and the whole solution. With a vision, you can determine the critical capabilities and conditions a solution should have for it to deliver value and meet needs more effectively. Also, you and your stakeholders can concentrate on identifying the primary requirements of your stakeholders, without being unwittingly drawn deep into only a single option for a solution. However, as there are usually several options available to solve a problem, you should focus your discussions on results and agree first upon your chosen solution would enable or support. By failing to agree on an overall vision, you will just be collecting requirements without a delivered solution.
Break Your Solution Requirements Down into Categories
When you have created a vision, you can then break down your solution requirements into functional and non-functional.
For the functional requirements, they should define specific information, behaviors, rules, responses and operations of the solution. They should outline: what your solution would support; what your stakeholders would experience and do while they are part of using the solution; what data or information you will be managing; and what circumstances responses and behaviors will be under in order for you to ensure the expected outcomes will be realized. Also remember that though functional requirements are, most of the time, specified in the context of technical system or software capabilities, solutions that you can do manually have functional requirements, as well.
For the non-functional requirements, they specify the manner a solution will operate and the environment it operates in. With them, you can describe a solution’s appropriate qualities and any condition and supplemental expectation it must meet and support. All in all non-functional requirements define standards for usability (how easy a solution can be figured out or understood); reliability (the extent users can rely on a solution to be accessible when necessary); performance (the quickness and efficiency a solution would work and respond to requests and commands for operation); security (the system’s level of protection put in place); design (the expected visual elements); accessibility (the support a solution provides for people with disabilities who would use it, particularly those with vision or hearing disorders); documentation (the type and extent of the written documentation associated with a solution); information capacity (requirements for data or media amount that can be stored over time) and information architecture (the organization or arrangement of information found in a solution). Aside from these, non-functional requirements also cover what stakeholders would require of a solution.
After you have defined your customer solution requirements, you should make sure you specify and document all of them with the help of your business analyst. And finally, conduct a solution inventory and gap analysis, as well as obtain sign-off of requirements with your sponsors.