Scope Definition

Course Category: Fundamentals
Course Duration: 1 day
Course Credit: 7 PDU
Prerequisites: None

You need information and stakeholder buy-in prior to writing requirements. We call the collection and documentation of this information “Scope”. Whether you begin writing requirements with a clean slate or respond to a customer’s set of requirements, understanding the Scope of the product is essential prior to writing, reviewing, or implementing requirements.

Failure to address Scope prior to writing requirements is one of the major reasons for continuous requirement rework and failure to obtain a good set of requirements in a timely manner. No one can write requirements without a vision. Without a documented Scope, each author will have a different vision and the resulting requirements will be woefully defective. Efforts to identify defective requirements are not only time consuming, but fraught with arguments between team members who have different visions. Due to time constraints, you will find yourself in verification before you uncover all the requirement defects.

Learning how to gather and document Scope is one of the most productive steps you can take to improve your requirements. Information documented in the Scope definition phase will support the design and verification efforts and can reduce your schedule by 30% or more from start to finish.

Course Objective

To build a firm foundation for defining, interpreting, and verifying requirements.

Develop skills to enable you to:

  • Bound the scope of your product and manage to that scope
  • Collect the information needed to write good requirements
  • Get buy-in from all stakeholders before the requirement wars begin
  • Implement a straight-forward process for obtaining and documenting information critical throughout your product’s life-cycle

Course Outline

  • Requirement management process overview
  • Understanding the first step – Scope
  • How to define need, goals, and objectives*
  • How to identify stakeholders and drivers*
  • How to develop operational concepts*
  • How to identify and document external interfaces*
  • Managing the scope process

* Includes examples and student exercises

Intended Audience

This training is critical for those responsible for capturing and documenting requirements. Representatives of all the product’s stakeholders will be involved in developing, reviewing, and approving requirements, and this training will benefit them and your requirement effort.

  • System Engineers (SE)
  • Requirement Engineers (RE)
  • Business Analysts (BA)
  • Subject Matter Experts (SME)
  • Program and Project Managers (PM)
  • Developers
  • Testers
  • Independent Verification and Validation (IVV) Team
  • Customers
  • Users
  • Marketing

You may not need this course if:

  • You receive requirements from someone else, and they provide all of this data for your product and requirements with rationale.
  • You are already collecting and documenting this information, and it is used by the requirement writers and the development, verification, and validation personnel.

Build On This Training

If your organization is looking for additional training, also consider our 2- and 3-day seminars where we cover “Scope Definition” in the first day.

Contact Us to Schedule for Your Organization

Contact us to schedule this course, or have the content and materials of this course tailored to the initiatives of your organization. More about tailored courses >>

Register for a Public Course

View our public course schedule and register.