When software products are late to launch, a practical solution is to drop features from a release while still delivering a product your customers will love. If part of your process is to tie business objectives to product features, you'll have at hand the information needed to decide how to proceed-as well as a guide to prioritize development efforts throughout the project. Joy Beatty explains how to elicit measurable business objectives from stakeholders. She demonstrates how to write statements that describe how a feature contributes to business objectives and ways to assign a business value to each feature. Armed with this data, stakeholders can compare features quantitatively, taking emotion out of scoping decisions. As a reminder of the techniques discussed, Joy shares a Business Objectives Model quick reference for you to take home and use in your requirements elicitation sessions.

Have you ever delivered an application with functionality that was not what the stakeholders really wanted-or needed? Have you ever discovered that you were listening to the wrong people? Has your team ever developed a really beautiful application that no one uses? A truly successful project delivers what is most important to the business, the sponsor, and the key stakeholders. Carol Askew shares ten requirement-related tips she uses at her large healthcare organization. For example, to keep her projects on track, Carol developed specific requirements checkpoints to review throughout the software development lifecycle. She describes what to look for in project initiation documents, requirements elicitation sessions, user stories, scope issues, and project schedules. Take back ideas that you can use right away to help achieve success in your own projects.

By learning the best mechanics for getting from problem-business needs and requirements-to solution-architecture and design-your team can turbo-charge its development process to generate the most creative and innovative solutions. Christopher Brandt explores how the top architects and design teams challenge apparent constraints, brainstorm solutions with stakeholders, ask the right questions, and ultimately determine the best design approach for the product. Challenging constraints enables the architecture team to identify the "real" problems the system will solve. Brainstorming empowers the entire team to conjure up many possibilities for the design solution. Asking probing questions results in fully understanding the requirements, the challenges, and the value proposition in order to recognize the right solution for the problem at hand. Having the decision-making power allows the project to move forward with confidence.

Stand in a room full of business analysts and you are bound to hear the phrase "gather and document requirements" way too often. Many of today's business analysts have an image problem, resulting from their limited-often self-imposed-role on projects. However, business analysts have the opportunity to move beyond an analyzing and documenting role to become a trusted advisor to the business. Kent McDonald describes techniques and tools you can use to become a leader in the quest for creating business value and improving organizational performance. In other words, you can transition from gathering requirements to becoming an advisor who offers solutions to business problems. Join Kent and learn to think more like a business owner, help improve decision making in your organization, and much more. Leave with a new set of goals and approaches in your toolkit to start down the path of trusted advisor status.