The RAVEN Blog

The planning phase of RAMP (Requirements Analysis and Management Process) sets the stage for requirements work. You collect some initial information to help scope the effort, and then you  develop a plan for eliciting, specifying, and verifying requirements with project stakeholders. In some companies, all of the requirements work is completed at the beginning of the project and signed off, following a traditional or modified waterfall approach. In other companies, requirements work is performed in a series of feature-driven iterations using lean or agile development methods. You do the same tasks with either approach. The difference is primarily in when you perform your requirements work, not how you perform it. In either case, you still need to do some amount of requirements planning at the beginning of the project.

In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Define the high-level goals and business requirements for the project
• Identify the application end users and other stakeholders for the project
• Identify business processes to be impacted or transformed in the project
• Define the end-user capabilities required for each process identified
• Determine business priorities and order capabilities to be implemented

The Ravenflow RAMP Methodology describes a business-driven, best practices approach to planning, eliciting, specifying, validating and managing requirements for maximum project success. Bringing together proven business process and use case analysis techniques, the methodology enables rapid definition of essential business requirements by modeling and analyzing the processes where the solution will be used. Required capabilities are mapped from their parent business processes, then broken down into increasing levels of detail until the entire project scope has been specified. This not only ensures the requirements fully reflect business needs, but contain the detail necessary for successful implementation by the development team.

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Once all the project requirements have been successfully elicited, specified, and confirmed, you need to keep track of them throughout the development process to ensure they are being implemented in accordance with business needs. While in a perfect world all requirements would be 100% accurate and could be implemented exactly as specified, the reality is that changes will occur and you must be prepared to deal with them. This means having a way of identifying and organizing the requirements so you can maintain control as changes begin to surface, and can quickly trace the changes back to the original requirements and verify they are acceptable to stakeholders. It also means making sure that accepted changes are reflected in all the project documentation so you have a complete history available for future reference as necessary.

In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Identify, organize, and manage the project requirements
• Track the implementation status of requirements under development
• Review and process requirements changes made during implementation
• Update requirements documentation and other artifacts to reflect changes
• Facilitate end-user acceptance testing of the completed software application

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Before they are implemented by the development team, you ask the stakeholders to review and confirm that the project requirements are clear, complete, and accurate. This activity is either performed by having stakeholders individually review and comment on the requirements artifacts and specification documents, or by scheduling and facilitating requirements review meetings with groups of stakeholders. Regardless of the approach, the goal is to validate that your understanding of the requirements are correct and, if not, to update them accordingly.

In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Plan requirements review sessions with end users and stakeholders
• Prepare requirements review packages for delivery to the review team
• Facilitate requirements review sessions or monitor independent reviews
• Collect and selectively incorporate feedback from reviewers
• Secure requirements sign-off or approval from key project stakeholders

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After the requirements elicitation meetings, you spend time compiling, analyzing, and organizing your notes so you can flesh out the requirements in more detail. This is when you finalize the glossary of business terms for the project, model business processes and use cases, generate visual diagrams, and define both the functional and non-functional requirements associated with each capability. These detailed requirements also include business rules to be enforced or screen mock-ups that give end users a sense of how the application will look. Finally, in this phase you take what you’ve defined and produce detailed requirements specifications.

In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Create sharable glossary of business terms, including actors and objects
• Model business processes, business use cases, and system use cases
• Define requirements associated with business processes and use cases
• Analyze and refine business processes and use cases as required
• Develop and publish requirements specifications and other documents

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Before the project team can successfully implement requirements, they need a clear understanding of the functional, non-functional and other key characteristics of those requirements. The elicitation phase of RAMP (Requirements Analysis and Management Process) describes the activities you perform to interact with stakeholders, to discover their essential product or application needs, and gain the understanding necessary to specify them in more complete detail. While the other activities discussed in this webinar series are important, eliciting and specifying the project requirements are the real heart of your work.

In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Plan requirements elicitation meetings with end users and stakeholders
• Facilitate requirements elicitation meetings with end users and stakeholders
• Interview end users and stakeholders to identify essential business needs
• Confirm the project goals, applicable processes, and required capabilities
• Gather requirements notes, capability details, and related information

Watch it now!

Requirements Analysis and Management Process

The planning phase of RAMP sets the stage for requirements work. You collect some initial information to help scope the effort, and then you  develop a plan for eliciting, specifying, and verifying requirements with project stakeholders. In some companies, all of the requirements work is completed at the beginning of the project and signed off, following a traditional or modified waterfall approach. In other companies, requirements work is performed in a series of feature-driven iterations using lean or agile development methods. You do the same tasks with either approach. The difference is primarily in when you perform your requirements work, not how you perform it. In either case, you still need to do some amount of requirements planning at the beginning of the project.

In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Define the high-level goals and business requirements for the project
• Identify the application end users and other stakeholders for the project
• Identify business processes to be impacted or transformed in the project
• Define the end-user capabilities required for each process identified
• Determine business priorities and order capabilities to be implemented

The Ravenflow RAMP Methodology describes a business-driven, best practices approach to planning, eliciting, specifying, validating and managing requirements for maximum project success. Bringing together proven business process and use case analysis techniques, the methodology enables rapid definition of essential business requirements by modeling and analyzing the processes where the solution will be used. Required capabilities are mapped from their parent business processes, then broken down into increasing levels of detail until the entire project scope has been specified. This not only ensures the requirements fully reflect business needs, but contain the detail necessary for successful implementation by the development team.

Watch it now!

The Ravenflow Requirements Analysis and Management Process (RAMP) is a business-oriented requirements methodology that describes a best practices approach to defining product, system or software application requirements for optimal implementation by your project team. With a primary objective of getting the right requirements defined up-front, the RAMP methodology has the following key characteristics:

• It reflects a clear business perspective, where the entire requirements lifecycle is driven by business, for business.
• It is process-based, where requirements are defined by analyzing the business processes where the resulting solution will be used.
• It emphasizes the importance of enabling clear communication and true collaboration between business and IT stakeholders.
• It is highly compatible with lean, agile approaches to software development and delivery.
• It is tool- and technology-agnostic, and thus can be applied successfully whether RAVEN or any other product is being used.

The Ravenflow RAMP Methodology describes a business-driven, best practices approach to planning, eliciting, specifying, validating and managing requirements for maximum project success. Bringing together proven business process and use case analysis techniques, the methodology enables rapid definition of essential business requirements by modeling and analyzing the processes where the solution will be used. Required capabilities are mapped from their parent business processes, then broken down into increasing levels of detail until the entire project scope has been specified. This not only ensures the requirements fully reflect business needs, but contain the detail necessary for successful implementation by the development team.

Watch it now!