Gathering requirements requires a certain consulting skill set. To be most effective, you need to be a dual career path person who is not only an SAP consultant, but also a business person who can understand the customer business processes and their business. The outputs of requirements gathering also are direct inputs into time duration estimation, cost estimating, budgeting, scheduling time line, overall project cost and answering the question: how long will this project take, what will it cost and how many people does the project development need.
Projects exist to meet stakeholder needs. The project charter again outlines the overall need. Collecting Requirements is the back and forth process of defining and documenting the detailed stakeholder needs to meet project objectives. Gathering requirements is not an overnight task and is also a never ending ongoing process where new requirements are dreamed up, captured, submitted, evaluated, accepted or rejected, implemented, tested, fixed and released to the customer.
During the requirement study phase, our consultants work very closely with the client company members understanding the requirements from the processes. These requirements are documented in detail defining the Scope Of Work (SOW). A detailed interaction with the key and end users allows an excellent network to be built between both the organisations.
Once the requirements are properly documented, both the teams are better equipped to decide upon the feasibility of the requirements and the possible solutions. Technical, financial, budget and team feasibilities are evaluated before deciding upon the best course of action.
Once the possible solution proposal is accepted and approved, a detailed functional specification document is prepared. The functional specification document defines in detail the functionalities expected out of the proposed solution. This avoids any misunderstandings or laps while designing the solution. Properly defined functional specification document allows us to maintain the project time line and budget constraints.
Once the functional specification document is finalized and frozen, the design and development team designs various software design templates. These are presented to the client company for approval (both from key users and end users). An emphasis is set on making sure that the design templates adhere to certain standards of user friendly interfaces.
Upon completion of the business process logic implementation, the software development team along with the business analysts performs various testing procedures to make sure that the solution is bug free. Once the developer testing is completed, the key users evaluate the software solution to make sure that the business process scenarios are properly implemented into the software solution.