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Hi,
It would be a great help if someone could clear one of the many : ) questions I have. My question is " When do you get a sign off on the requirements? Is it right after the Business requirements (BRD)have been gathered or is it after all the business requirement,funtional requirements ,non- fuctional reuquirements and corresponding use cases and diagrams (basically after the completion of FSD) are complete."
Thanks
Zaineb
I recommend you take a look at the IIBA's BABOK (v1.7 is avaialble from their website) and specifically at the chapter called Varification (5.11.) It's only a couple of pages long and will answer several of your questions.
As for your specific questions above; you should aim to get signoff as each document is completed. Each document in a formal project environement is treated as a specific artefact that needs to be managed, and approvals are one of the management activities.
However, different organsiations have different cultures around who signs what. In some organsiations the busines stakeholders sign everything, and in others only the sponsor and pm do. In some organsaitons the approvers are limited to IT once you get into solution specific documents and in others everyone is watching everything throughout the process.
You should speak with your Project Manager and line manager about your approval plan for each document, especially on your first run through the process.
In fact you could even pre-define who will be on what document and incoporate it into a requirements communication plan (see the BABOK for Requirements Planning ch 3, and Requirements Communication ch 6.)
While I'm not an Agile evangelist, I do believe that the days when all the specs are created upfront are gone. Every project has some form of iterations so I agree with Craig that you should not wait for one big, formal sign-off but you should rather have checkpoints in the process which call for iterative review the artifacts and deliverables.
This way, even if you work in a strict waterfall process, the final sign-off becomes simply a formality.
It's not unlike getting married: when you ask your significant other in marriage you want to be 99.99% confident they answer will be "Yes!" Same goes with sign-off on requirements and specifications: when you ask the stakeholders for sign-off you want to be 99.99% that they will approve the state of the documents.
This can only be achieved if, at every step of the process, the client is involved and confirms that their needs will be met with the given requirements, logical solution, and design.
- Adrian
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