BAs Will Falter Until They Learn to Discover REAL, Business Requirements

This paper's primary purpose is to make educators aware of critical requirements concepts that customary courses and literature fail to address appropriately. Widely-accepted conventional requirements models continue to create creep - changes to settled requirements which are a major cause of project overruns. Business Analysts and others will continue to encounter such creep so long as they follow flawed models focusing on requirements of a product or system being created without adequately also discovering the REAL, business requirements the product must satisfy to provide value. Much of the difficulty comes from mistakenly trying to interpret these qualitatively different concepts in terms of familiar similar-sounding models, such as depicting them as merely different requirements levels. The two types of requirements are distinguished and the powerful Problem PyramidTM tool is described as a way to more reliably get both right quicker with less effort and aggravation. Educational implications are discussed.