High Level Requirements Gathering Questions for New Development Projects

Information from this questionnaire can be used to develop high level business requirements.

Determine Business Objectives

    1.    What are your goals in developing this system?

    2.    Who are the key stakeholders and users? Do their goals differ? If so, how?

    3.    How do the system goals map to business goals?

    4.    What is the most important business goal of the system?

    5.    Will the system change the way you are doing things now?

    6.    Will the system help you be more efficient?  How?

    7.    What are the system deliverables? 

    8.    What will the new system accomplish that is not currently accomplished manually or with other systems?

    9.    What will the new system do?

Determine Future Needs

    1.    What business requirements will this system address?

    2.    What information do you need from this system that you don’t have now? 

    3.    Is any of this data currently captured in any other corporate system?

    4.    How would you like to see this information?  

    5.    What functionality do you need from the system?

6.        Is the data and/or functionality shared by other (many) business areas?  If so, which?

7.        If the reports were dynamic, what would they do differently?

8.        How much historical information is required?

Determine Current Problems

    1.    What are the current problems facing without the system today?

    2.    What problems should this system solve?

    3.    Do you have to do things manually that you would like to automate?

    4.    Do you have performance problems that need to change?

    5.    Do you have functional limitations that you’d like to change?

6.        Are you using packages that force you to constrain your business functionality to the boundaries of the package?

7.        Which reports do you currently use?  What data on the report is important?  How do you use the information?

8.        Are there specific bottlenecks to getting at information?

9.        How do you analyze the information you currently receive?  What type of data is used?  How do you currently get the data?  How often do you get new data?

10.    What type of ad hoc analysis do you typically perform?  Who requests ad hoc information?  What do you do with the information?

Determine System Users

   1.    Who will be using the system?

   2.    What are the titles and roles of the people who will use the system?

   3.    What are their levels of expertise?

Determine Criteria for Success

   1.    What is most important for success of the application?

   2.    What do we need to accomplish to make this project successful?

   3.    What do we need to change to make this project successful?

   4.    What buy-in do we need?

   5.    Are we lacking any critical elements such as budget, resource allocation, or support?

   6.    What are training considerations for developers and users?

Assumptions

    1.    List assumptions

Issues

    1.    List open issues, responsible parties and resolution date