1. Three Baby-Steps toward Agile Requirements Management
Kurt Solarte, Managing Consultant
If you are beginning to consider a move to more agile methods, you may be looking for a set of
‘best practices’ for agile requirements elicitation and agile requirements management. What you will
likely find is many prescriptive and detailed ‘best practices’ which I personally have found to be
situational at best, and often just too much to consume for an organisation new to the concepts. What I
propose to offer in this post is a few ‘baby steps’ that can help an organisation move toward an agile
environment and prepare for some of the more prescriptive methods like SCRUM or eXtreme
programming (XP).
When making a move toward agile methods, there are three main recommendations that I
believe should be considered to prepare for a more agile requirements practice, and a team as a whole.
1. Collaboration ─ While this is obviously a good idea in all methods of requirements
management and all stages of a project lifecycle, it is an essential element to agile methods
and agile requirements management.
2. Embrace Change ─ this is almost a counter intuitive step for many business analysts. To be
agile in requirements management, we must acknowledge change happens, embrace it, and
make it part of our process.
3. Support of upper management ─ Becoming agile is an organisational change as much as a
development practice, and without clear support from upper management this change will
be difficult; if not impossible.
Recommending good collaboration is a bit like recommending good work ethic; it seems as if it
should go without saying. However, for organisations used to a very siloed waterfall method, real
collaboration as a standard operating procedure may have fallen by the wayside. It can become easy in a
waterfall method to simply over-document deliverables and blindly send them to the next team. In an
agile method, an organisation will begin to keep ‘living documents’ that constantly change and grow ─
this requires true collaboration and teaming. In order to properly include all members of the project
team and stakeholders, an organisation must not only take on more inclusive methods, but must
educate all associated people on the use of the method, including management and stakeholders. If
one expects individuals to be involved, the individuals must know how, why, and when they are
expected be involved. Simply said, to create an inclusive method, all individuals associated with the
project must feel and be encouraged to be involved. One simple step many larger organisations have
found useful is the adoption of stakeholders’ terminology. Often in agile methods we get very focused
on the new names, terms, and roles ─ all at the detriment to collaboration. Many stakeholders will feel
more comfortable with requirements, time periods, and project roles being expressed in their own
terminology. This should be seen by the project team as a minor secession for the sake of greater
collaboration.

2. Embrace Change. To many Business Analysts and Project Managers, this will seem counter-
intuitive. As professional BAs and PMs we have been taught to identify all requirements and lock down
the scope. However, we all know change does happen, and what often defines the success of a project
is how we deal with that change. While traditionally an organisation would manage this change with
some sort of project or scope change management process; which gives a structure to altering
requirements which are typically fully elicited. In agile methods, organisations acknowledge that change
is constant in technology projects, and move to embrace that change. To make steps toward agility, an
organisation may need to change their requirements elicitation methods. The elicitation can begin with
very broad requirements that outline a general scope, do some high level requirements modelling,
prioritise what has been captured, and prepare the team to change as needed. Once the broad
requirements are documented and ranked, the team can then begin to add further detail to
requirements in an ordered fashion. This means the stakeholders will give detail as it is needed, and the
team will change documentation as details emerge. The stakeholders know their priorities and
requirements will change, and the project team knows the project documentation is ‘alive’ and changing
as the project moves on, and as the need for detail requires.
While the above detailed steps are important ways to ease into agile, arguably the most
necessary step is getting upper management support. The management lines for both the project teams
and the stakeholders must understand the use of agile methods is an organisational change, and not just
a development method. These management lines must fully comprehend the concepts behind
embracing change, increasing collaboration, and the notion of practicing constant requirements
prioritisation. As with many successful organisational changes, the use of ‘on the ground’ champions of
the new process are important, but a clear message of support by company leadership is imperative. A
project kick-off that includes an executive saying a few words of support for the new methods and
mentioning that management is watching for this to be a successful implementation, will go a long way
to drowning out the voices of the detractors.
As an organisation strives to become agile, it is important to remember to be agile in the
implementation of agile. Meaning, only take on as much agile process and change as your organisation
can handle in each ‘sprint’, or short change window; and only keep the agile processes needed to
improve implementation of technology projects. Organisations can often lose focus of their underlying
purpose for adopting agile methods, and begin to focus on ‘becoming agile’. There is not a prize or
reward that comes with completely adopting any particular agile method, so look to embrace the parts
of agile methods you need to find your success, and question anything else ─ because that is truly
becoming agile.