Recently while facilitating the strategic planning program with a company in the technology industry we had to make some decisions on how to categorize the requirements. Since the company had a lot of different types of requirements we had to revisit the definition of a requirement (see article Four Requirements That Make a Difference in Creating Solutions).

Due to rapid growth, expansion and culture of the company (very employee centric) the items on their strategy map ranged from the strategic to the operational. The strategy map needed to be vetted. The senior team thought it prudent to review the options for organizing their plans to ensure they took a good approach prior to moving forward. Every organization I have ever worked with always wants to discuss the best way to organize their strategy map prior to proceeding.

The options discussed included categorizing requirements by either stakeholder, sequence or purpose.

Stakeholder: Organizing by stakeholder means grouping all the requirements by one stakeholder group or individual together. In this case it could be by department, business unit or by the business leader. The challenge is this approach is that often requirements are required by multiple stakeholders. Often stakeholder groupings are seen at the road map level (execution plan) and not the strategy map level in planning.

Sequence: Organizing by sequence groups requirements from the highest level with least details to the most detailed. This would mean that you would follow the standard requirements format.

• Business Requirements – strategic, tactical, operational
• Stakeholders – logical groupings that have influence and impact on the business
• Solutions – functional and non-functional (quality)
• Transformational – Implementation and Change

Purpose: Organizing requirements by purpose has to do with creating links in the process of the business. It has a lot to do with a logical grouping of activities or actions that must be taken. At the strategy map level this does not make a lot of sense. However, it can be argued that when you categorize strategic elements by business impact zones (Process, Technology, Business Development, People and Culture) you are categorizing by purpose. The challenge is something called traceability.

The technology client found it useful to review the different requirement categorizing options. In this case the leadership team was familiar with business analysis best practice and wanted to review the options.

Since we were dealing with a company that grew rapidly and had a vast amount of information in a strategy map that needed to be vetted it was logical to choose to categorize by Sequence Business Requirements. This allowed the leadership team to break down the strategy map into strategic, tactical and operational business elements. They ended up with three maps for each level.

They realized that as a leadership team they could focus on the things that would make a difference in their business (strategic) and their teams could handle the other components (tactical and operational). This provided the senior team focus. Great lesson learned.

This Weeks Red Question: In what way has your team(s) clearly categorized your business requirements so that your people focus with purpose?