Top 25 business analysis deliverables for a web development

Hi,

I am currently involved in the business analysis for a major website development and wanted to share my findings – in terms of business analyis with you.

- There are few standards in the IT space, there are even fewer in the web dev space. It seems that the web development space is crowed with mostly youngster that want to work ‘creatively’ and want to work their way.. hiding behind technica jargon so business can not challenge them and they can continue doing what / how they want to.
Just looking at the huge variety of what a proper business analysis document should entail is surprising… besides the point that this document has about 10 different names..mostly called functional spec or requirements specification…

. . . and there are the few guys out there who maintain and enforce a smater way of working…. keep it up !
I benefited from what you did and shared.

Here is what I would deliver as part of the Functional specification for a web development project. The tool I personnaly use to create those deliverable are in brackets.
See www.consulting-handbook.com for a list of all tools and more details.

• A. Management summary
• B. Audience of document
• C. Related documents
• D. Version control
• E. TOC

- now the real stuff

1. Scope definition (Is-Is not )
2. Project background
3. Project and business intentions/objectives (Project charter)
4. Stakeholder management (expectation management – stakeholder analysis)
5. Stakeholder view (stakeholder map)

Users
6. User  – user groups, user definitions, user profiles, user experience definition (tools not defined yet..coming soon)

Features
7. Concept map  (concept map/ context diagram)
8. Feature map (more detailed concept map… looks similar to Entity Relationship Diagram)
9. Feature interface definition – definition of each feature

Information Architecture
10. Content type definition
11. Content map (content map)
12. Content sources (black box diagram or ERD)
13. Content data model (logical data model or ERD)
14. Content objects

Process/interaction

15. High level business process (Functional decomposition or use cases or swim lane process flows)
16. Enduser user cases (use cases)

Layout/outline/structure – informed by the Information Architecture

17. Sitemap
18. Page types
19. Wireframes

‘Project hygiene’
20. Decision log
21. project risk
22. Issues
23. Assumptions
24 Dependencies
25. Approval signature

So, what do you think ?
What is missing ?
What would you have forgotten ?

Tagged as: business requirements, functional spec, information architecture, technical spec, web development project