Category: Requirements

High-Level Performance Requirements

The high level performance requirements germane to a “business professional” are supported by general and specific interpersonal, customer, community, and technical skill requirements. These requirements include:

Professionalism

The original concept of professions and professionals had general and specific characteristics which differentiated them from technicians, vendors, and non-professionals. The characteristics are special or unique competence in special tasks and services; competence defined by a comprehensive and self-governing organization of practitioners.

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What the Heck are “Business Requirements?”

Business Requirements are requirements on the business, not requirements for a [technical] solution used by the business. Business Requirements are what must be delivered/achieved to provide value.

It seems like everywhere, everyone bandies-about the phrase “business requirements.”  Yet, if one pays attention, one might get the idea that the phrase is applied in any and every context wherein the speaker wants to apply some level of mandate to his or her “wishes” without actually appearing selfish.

Case in point: we often hear technical people referring to the need to implement functionality or solutions provided by their technology as “meeting business requirements.” As in “Using this server is a business requirement.”

But isn’t functionality a solution? How can solutions be the same as business requirements?

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Understanding Expectations

Once we defined a set of requirements, we both knew what we had to accomplish that would meet the other party’s expectations…

I recently spent time with my attorney on personal legal matters, and being somewhat obsessed with attaining objectivity in interpersonal communication in the workplace, I used the occasion to practice using precise terminology in the discussions. My attorney rose to the occasion and responded as someone who appreciated that she didn’t have to talk to me as if I were non-educated with confused vocabulary, and we both enjoyed the conversations.

In the course of working through the legal matters, we were careful to understand “rights” and the “correct” manner to pursue (or protect) those rights. (“Correct” being an objective definition.) My attorney appreciated that I did not confuse right with correct.

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