Effective Analysis and Documentation

Business Requirements Document - Examples

In this chapter, we present several business needs and examples of how they might be described in the business requirements document.

Example #1

Business need: There is a new regulatory requirement AA24, which we need to be compliant with.

Current state: Since it is a new requirement, it needs to be implemented from scratch. The only thing which has been partly implemented, is customer due diligence - for the purpose of another regulatory requirement, gathering permanent residency from all new customers during customer onboarding is currently in the development.

Business goals and objectives: The AA24 must be implemented to the full extent by the end of November 2018.

Success criteria

  • The bank will be compliant with the regulatory requirement in the required extent and in the required deadlines

Constraints and Restrictions

  • Due to the deadline in November 2018, everything needs to be ready by the end of August as the last production release of systems is in August. Another release is in December, which is too late.

Assumptions

  • If everything goes according to the plan, the process of customer due diligence will be implemented in the Q3/2018, so there will be enough time to merge this process with the AA24 implementation
  • The final version of the regulatory requirement will not differ in big extent from the current version, which will form the baseline for the AA24 implementation
  • The customer due diligence process is going to be implemented within the project called CDD2018. This generates an assumption for the project to deliver the process in time and the related risk of not delivering it.

Business Risks

  • The project CDD2018 will not implement the customer due diligence process in time or in quality the AA24 requires
    • Impact: This risk has a high impact. Without having this process in place, the organization will not be compliant with AA24 which may cause sanctions from regulator
    • Risk avoidance: The status of CDD2018 needs to be checked regularly by the team implementing AA24 to assure that the process is implemented in the form AA24 requires. Regular status meetings need to be organized to ensure that everything goes according to the plan, and the deadlines are feasible.
  • The final version of the regulatory requirement will differ significantly from the present one. To implement the requirement in time, the implementation must start before the final requirement version is released. This introduces a risk of additional rework if significant changes occur during the implementation.
    • Impact: Depends on the significance of the change and when it occurs
    • Risk avoidance: The only thing which could be done is attending the regular meetings organized by the regulator and updating plans accordingly

Solution outline (not part of BRD)

  • Modify customer onboarding process
    • Add customer due diligence
    • Refuse customers with negative check
  • Regularly check customers for possible conflicts between their tax residency and permanent residency
  • Report customers with conflicts to the regulator

Example #2

Business need: Template management is complicated and error-prone because there is no single place to store document templates - they are spread across multiple places and systems.

Current state: There are two systems responsible for generating documents and storing the document templates. The old templates are stored in DocGen and can be generated only manually. The new ones are managed by DocGenNET - these can be generated by calling a service from other systems. There are also static documents, which are not generated and are simply stored in the shared folder from where anybody can print it.

Business goals and objectives

  • To have a single place where all types of templates will be stored
  • To automate the current manual templates review and approval processes
  • To track the complete history of template changes

Success criteria: Solution meeting the described goals will be considered successful. No specific budget or deadline requirements are known.

Constraints and Restrictions

  • None

Risks

  • None

Solution outline (not part of BRD)

  • Develop new template management system or buy an existing one
  • Basic features:
    • Templates management including tracking changes
    • Review process
    • Approval process
    • Generating documents from the templates, both manual and from other systems using a service

Example #3

Business Need: The core information system becomes outdated, expensive to maintain, and sometimes impossible to extend.

Current state: The legacy information system is old, which causes each change to be unacceptably expensive, takes a long time to implement, introduces errors. Besides, some changes are not possible to implement at all due to the outdated architecture.

Business goals and objectives

  • To cut expenses on the information system maintenance by 15%
  • To cut the average annual expenses on the IS changes by 20%
  • To enable implementation of the changes which were evaluated impossible to implement or too expensive to implement due to the outdated information system

Success criteria: Solution meeting the described goals will be considered successful

Constraints and Restrictions

  • There is an ongoing debate among board members regarding the IT strategy for the upcoming several years. It also tackles the topic of whether to prefer custom development solutions or ready to use solutions. The results from this debate should be available by the end of Q3/2018. Requests for proposals should be sent to vendors only after the outcomes from this debate are known.
  • Due to the company policy, the new system can't be provided by a company which is not a US company
  • Although there is no budget restriction for the solution and the final price will depend on the offers provided by the vendors, if the price exceeds $1,000,000, it will be a subject of an approval process

Assumptions

  • It's assumed that only the core system will be replaced
    • No other replacements are considered
    • The other systems will remain in place, and the new system must be therefore ready to integrate with them

Risks

  • Implementing new information system presents a high risk itself since when not done properly, it might influence the whole company
    • A certified project manager will be required on our side to manage the whole activity
    • At least 20% of the time of senior managers will be allocated for the activity so that we are sure that the current processes are described well, and there is enough time to think out how the processes could be optimized using the modern technologies

Possible solutions (not part of BRD)

  • Upgrade the current information system to the new version provided by the same vendor
  • Implement new information system from scratch
  • Keep the current information system - requires financial analysis

Example #4

Business Need: Processing requests for disbursement of funds is complicated and takes too much time. This causes customer complaints.

Current State:

The process and the system were designed in the time when all disbursement requests came from the branch. Then, the possibility to initiate disbursement request through the internet and mobile banking were introduced; however, the process is not as effective as if it was designed with the internet banking/mobile banking in mind.

Business Process: [diagram]

Workflow in the Application: [diagram]

Identified Ineffectiveness: ...

Business Goals and Objectives

  • To cut the average time needed to process a single disbursement request by 20%
  • To make the process more straightforward, so that junior officers can start processing the requests too
  • To cut the number of customer complaints regarding disbursement of funds by 10%

Constraints and Restrictions

  • There is a process that is started automatically once the disbursement process ends. This process is currently being reviewed, and since it is directly related to the disbursement, the review must be finished before some decisions are made regarding disbursement.
  • Each new process in the company is implemented in the process framework called FLEXi. If it is decided that the process is worth implementing from scratch, FLEXi must be used.

Business Risks

  • Disbursement of funds is a critical process as it is directly related to releasing money from the bank. To minimize the chance of fatal mistakes, the new process must be therefore consulted with all managers and team leaders and tested more than any other process.

Example #5

Business Need: Customers complain that our competitors offer parcel tracking, which we do not have. It has become a standard service, and we are behind our rivals.

Current State: Currently, customers are only notified once the parcel is taken over by the driver. SMS notification is usually sent to let the customer know what time it is expected to be delivered.

Business Goals and Objectives

  • To catch up with the competitors, customer needs to be notified about the current state of the delivery right after it changes

Success Criteria

  • Company must provide the same parcel tracking service as the main competitors
  • The number of customer care requests regarding the state of the delivery will decrease by 50% during the first 6 months after deployment

Assumptions

  • It is assumed that it is technically possible to track the delivery (that we have the information stored and available) and provide this information in some form to the customers

Business Risks

  • None

Example #6

Need: When the user selects to delete a document, the system shall ask for confirmation. For example: "Are you sure you want to delete this document?". Users frequently delete important documents.

Current State: At the moment, the system deletes the document without asking.

In this case, the presented need is not a business need, it is a user requirement. Since it is a requirement of a specific user group, not something which would be important to the whole organization, a BRD is not needed in this case. However, it is still a need that shares the same attributes with the business need, so its description usually includes the same parts: current state, assumptions, constraints, risks, possible solutions, etc. A BRD-like document could be created for operational requests, it just should not be called BRD and should not state it describes business needs.

Example #7

Need: According to a new regulatory requirement, a DocGen system must be modified in a way that the Purchase Contract document (id: DOC-577) will include a new paragraph stating that the client has signed the contract at the branch voluntarily and not under pressure.

This example is also not a business need as stakeholders did not state a need, but rather a solution to some need. What they say is: “Just change the template in DocGen system, and you’re done. Easy.” If the analyst accepts it and “just changes it,” he failed in his role. What if besides signing the printed-out paper contract at the branch, there is also a possibility to request the product online, generate the contract in PDF and sign it through SMS? What if this PDF version is generated in a different system using a different template format, and therefore it must be modified as well? Will the proposed solution deliver value? Apparently not. The bank will end up having customers who are going to sign a contract that will not include the mandatory statement.

Instead, a skilled analyst would look at the problem from a higher perspective and rephrase it to: "A new regulatory requirement orders us to put a statement to each purchase contract, making the client declare the contract has been signed voluntarily and not under pressure." Such a statement automatically triggers the analysis of all impacts the regulatory requirement could possibly have, resulting in a solution that describes all systems and artifacts which are needed to be changed.