Business Requirement Checklist: What You Need to Know

Setting up a business, especially if you are a first-timer, is honestly challenging. There are many tedious processes that you need to go through and documents you need to process. Once you have picked out a suitable location, come up with a business idea, and done your market research, it’s time to deep-dive further.

If you’re forming an LLC, aside from knowing your state’s requirements, such as how much does an LLC cost in Arkansas or which permits and licenses they require, and how to apply for them, you also need to prepare tons of paperwork and make crucial decisions. One great example is your business requirement checklist.

What is a Business Requirement Checklist?

This is also referred to as the Stakeholders Checklist and is a simple and step-by-step action plan used to gather and document business requirements identified according to the interests and concerns of stakeholders.

It is generally used for business planning and project planning. There are a number of ways to meet business requirements which are often through products, software, systems, and processes. Business requirements are typically listed in a Business Requirements Document or BRD. 

These are the objectives of having a Business Requirement Checklist:

  • Obtain an agreement from the stakeholders
  • Communicate the business needs, customer needs, and the solution needs to satisfy the said needs
  • Precisely describe the needs of the customer and business that the solution intends to meet

Data Gathering Methods

Here are some of the methods you can use to gather useful data:

  • One-on-One Meeting – This helps build trustful relationships with each group member and stakeholder to understand their individual perspectives regarding business requirements.
  • Interviews – Conducting group interviews help accelerate that data gathering for your business requirement document. It also allows members to hear and discuss the ideas of others and provide inputs for decision-making.
  • Facilitated Group Gatherings – This method allows larger groups and makes use of focused teams. This calls for gathering data in one facilitated session and then moving the group toward consensus.
  • Questionnaires – This method makes use of templates and patterns to develop lists of questions and questionnaires. These are helpful for gathering statistics, quick facts and also for obtaining answers and viewpoints from larger groups.

Categories of Business Requirements

Once data is gathered, the next step is to categorize all identified requirements in order to simplify business requirements analysis. 

  • Functional Requirements – These requirements will determine how a specific product, service, or solution should perform from an end-user’s viewpoint.
  • Operational Requirements – These requirements identify which operations should be performed to keep your products, services, or solutions operating over a specific period of time. This typically requires business requirements testing.
  • Technical Requirements – The technical requirements may include IT support, cybersecurity and data management services, etc., that you can need to successfully run your business. You might have to do some research about service providers in your close vicinity (Colorado it services, for instance).
  • Transitional Requirements – These are the requirements that cover how products, services, or solutions should be implemented and appropriately transferred to the end-user.

Every business requires processes that can be tedious and overwhelming to accomplish. However, often, these are essential steps that must be done in order to run your business successfully.