If you’ve been following along in our “Discovery Sessions Explained” blog post series, we’ve shared insights and sample questions to help you think through your business processes and team roles, as well as preparing for integrations and migrations.
During the last stop of our journey, we will take a close look at requirement gathering and approvals, so you have everything you need to make it easy for stakeholders to do their part in keeping things moving.
Requirements help you define who is doing what, and most importantly, why they are doing it. Think of requirements as the “mise en place” for your project. Yes, it takes time to define the different elements of your project but once everything is laid out in a way that allows your team to visually see all of the components (deliverable, owner, and the objective), the actual execution of the project is much more seamless.
Remember sentence structuring from your English grammar lessons? You learned the order of what exactly goes in a sentence, and the rules behind this order, so you can communicate clearly, correctly, and confidently.
Requirements are similar - there are a few blanks your team needs to fill in for the requirement to be complete and make sense. Let’s take a look at the structure of a requirement, followed by an example:
As a(n) role/title, I need to name of task, so objective/reason behind the task.
As an HR manager, I need to migrate my recruiting data from BambooHR to monday.com, so that the rest of my team has visibility into our candidate pipeline.
We understand it can be difficult to think in this mindset - you are getting extremely granular which can be challenging. Most of us have conditioned our muscle memory to just go through the motions, especially with recurring projects. This is where leaning on a monday.com partner, like our team at OrangeDot, is helpful. Our team of experts can take the information we have learned from the Discovery process with you and build out these requirements for you.
One thing to keep in mind: the number of requirements doesn’t necessarily equate to the complexity of a project. Requirements have different timelines and project tasks will also vary in depth. For example, a simple, easy project can have 40 quick requirements, but a more complex project may have ten larger requirements.
One of the most valuable parts about going through the exercise of outlining your requirements is all of the information your team discovers as you start asking questions, building on conversations, and having a two way dialogue about the behind-the-scenes of your projects.
Be sure to capture this information so your team can reference it as needed throughout Discovery and beyond. Having this “extra” information is also helpful when you’re sharing requirements with stakeholders because it will provide additional context to the “why” behind your requirements.
After you have built your requirements, the next part of this process is to get everything approved with the appropriate stakeholders. We always recommend seeking approval from the leadership first before going to the rest of the team. This approach avoids confusion or frustration in case the leadership team makes significant changes to the requirements.
We encourage you to think through your stakeholders that will need to approve requirements, and the order of approvals, before you start this process. This way, when it’s time for approvals, you’re not experiencing delays from having to figure out all of this information and you can keep moving the needle.
Leverage monday.com’s customizable boards to track all of your approvals! This will give your team a paper trail to reference all of the information you’ve worked hard to gather. You can even use monday.com forms to intake your approvals. Using these features will give you some practice with leaning on monday.com as your one source of truth.
Remember - requirement gathering and approvals are unique to each organization! We hope our insights give you a starting point, and we encourage you to reflect on your specific business processes to help prepare for this final part of the Discovery process.
At OrangeDot, we specialize in crafting smart Discovery plans and facilitating team sessions to assess where your business stands and where you aim to go. Building this alignment is essential for a successful monday.com implementation! Reach out to us today for a free consultation: Contact Us.
