Chapter 11

Documentation Review

In This Chapter:

Benefits of Documentation Reviews

A considerable amount of information about the business requirements can be gleaned by reviewing existing business rules, regulations, policies, user guides, contractual documentation, prior project archives, and lessons learned. Table 11-1 shows the benefits versus the disadvantages of documentation reviews. Usually a review of the existing business process area documentation is completed to help create the context for understanding the scope of project work.

Rules for Effective Requirements Documentation Reviews

The business analyst should keep in mind several rules when conducting documentation reviews:

Know the purpose for reviewing. As with other activities, this task is managed and time-bound to ensure effective use of project resources. Potential documentation review purposes include:

Prior system implementations can be reviewed for functional and supplemental requirements. This can help structure the current business requirements documentation into as-is sections and incremental to-be sections.

Technical documentation is reviewed for high-level solution architecture, business rules, and test scenarios.

Lessons learned are reviewed to capture those golden nuggets of information regarding what went right and wrong on previous projects.

Begin to create the rough draft outline of the business requirements document and fill in the relevant sections with the information that is collected through the review.

Populate the glossary with terms from former project documentation.

Add existing system documentation references and locations to the appendix.

Table 11-1—Benefits versus Disadvantages of Documentation Reviews

Tailoring Documentation Reviews

Documentation reviews can be valuable for most projects. The business analyst scales activities to the project environment. Table 11-2 shows document review variances scaled to the project profile.

Table 11-2—Document Reviews Scaled to Project Size, Risk, Complexity