Manage Your Project Using V-Model Methodology

Understand the Importance of the Business Requirements

The business requirements document (BRD) is an essential guide to delivering a project. It’s created during the first phase of the V-model process and serves as a reference to articulate the needs and objectives of the project to all stakeholders. It ensures that everyone involved has a clear and shared understanding of the requirements.

Here are three good reasons that demonstrate the importance of defining business requirements:

1. Clarifying needs: The business requirements document explains the needs to be met.

2. Detailed planning: The business requirements document helps to plan the project in detail.

3. Point of reference: The business requirements document acts as a basis for preparing specifications, testing, and final product sign-off.

Involve the Right People When Writing the BRD

The BRD is created by the project owners. This team is responsible for defining the project requirements and objectives and consists of various roles, such as engineers, subject matter experts, and our essential project managers.

As the project manager, you are taking on the role of a conductor who must orchestrate the production of the BRD. Working as a team is highly effective in producing a high-quality business requirements document—which means a BRD that contains sufficient detail and is easy for the reader to understand.

To get to this point, you’ll need to delegate certain tasks appropriately to ensure that the document is produced successfully.

Here are four principles to apply to successfully produce a quality document:

1. Check skills: Ensure that the team of project owners has all the required skills to write the business requirements. A skills inventory could be useful here.

2. Define roles and responsibilities: Clarify the roles and responsibilities of each member of the team. This way, you can delegate the writing and checking tasks to the appropriate people.

3. Emphasize communication and teamwork: Ensure that all team members can work together effectively and meet the deadline for producing the requirements.

4. Involve future users: Don’t forget to consider the opinions of future users when writing the BRD. Requirements experts might sometimes overlook these users or get them wrong.

Identify Needs and Objectives

In your role as project manager, you must learn to identify both requirements and objectives. It is your responsibility to ensure that this information is included in the business requirements.

To ensure that nothing is forgotten, you need your team’s help. Take notes! When you’re working in a team with project owners, you must gather and summarize information. Some pieces of information will be useful for defining needs and objectives.

While writing the various chapters within the business requirements document, delegate the technical parts to the technical roles within the project owners team and the functional parts to the more functional roles. Make sure you make coherent decisions when delegating. And finally, always remember to check and communicate instructions as a team to avoid any misunderstandings.

Organize the Business Requirements

With the amount of information you need to include in a business requirements document, you’ll need a coherent structure to organize the sections for writing and reading purposes. The good news is, as project manager, this is your job!

Create a plan for the business requirements and involve your team in writing the sections that are relevant to their areas of expertise.

A winning formula for this would include:

1. A clear structure: A BRD with a logical, well-defined structure and discrete sections for each aspect of the project will enable readers to easily find the information they need.

2. Links between sections: A BRD with links and cross-references between the different parts will give you a coherent whole and ensure that the information provided is mutually complementary.

Yes, you’re right that the structure of the business requirements document can vary from project to project. And that’s actually good, because it shows the importance of adapting to different contexts.

However, you will find that there are a number of common features that can be included in your business requirements documents when you use the V-model methodology.

This approach covers the various aspects of the project, ensuring that the team working on it on a day-to-day basis is fully prepared.

Here are six important steps to include in a business requirements document when using the V-model methodology.

Use the table below to check which roles are suitable for the various sections of the BRD. It shows the appropriate people to write and review each part of the BRD. This is a way of ensuring that you make informed decisions when delegating writing and checking tasks.

The quality manager is part of the V&V team. Remember them? Project owners, IT project team, and V&V. The quality manager can be enlisted to check the quality of the BRD. They check that it’s complete, consistent, and meets the requirements.

Specify the Structure

As the planning specialist within the project owners team, you’ll need to make the rules when you start talking about costs, deadlines, and project methodology.

When you’re creating the business requirements, you’ll need to write these sections. You’ll define the constraints in terms of time, budget, and project management methodology. Let’s take a more detailed look at how to tackle these topics.

1. Milestones and deadlines
   On the topic of time constraints, you’ll need to define the key stages of the project, which are called milestones. Specify the deadlines you wish to assign to each stage. This will enable you to track project progress and ensure that the objectives will be met within the requested timeframe.

2. Available resources
   On the topic of available resources, you’ll need to define the limits that the project cannot exceed. These can include the allocated budget, technical support, or required logistics. This will help guarantee a successful project.

3. Project methodology
   When deciding on the project methodology, feel free to mention your preferred method. This will determine how you will plan, execute, and control project activities. In our scenario, we’ll be leading the project using the V-model methodology.

Over to You!

Background

You’re currently responsible for coordinating the business requirements document, which will be a key resource used in delivering the AirGalaxy project.

Instructions

1. Complete the business requirements.
   Assemble the content provided by the different contributors in the business requirements document, ensuring that each contribution is placed within the correct section.

2. Assign writing tasks.
   Use the business requirements document schedule and assign each section to a team member, ensuring that these people have the required knowledge in the relevant area.

Let’s Recap

• The project manager is the main coordinator for producing the business requirements document. 

• They identify the client’s needs and involve the right people during the writing process.

• They define the document structure and specify how the project will be organized.

• They are responsible for the document quality and the final result.

Now that you’ve defined the high-level project scope in the business requirements, you’ll learn how to prepare the functional specifications, which will be a more in-depth description of the application functionality.