[Learning time: 3 mins]
Identifying and documenting business requirements as well articulated use cases or user stories is both art and science. In the fourth video of our ecommerce replatforming masterclass series, James Gurd gives practical advice and insights on how to capture business critical requirements to ensure you have a well-defined set of capabiities against which to evaluate ecommerce vendor platforms.
Hello and welcome to the fourth part of my master class video series on ecommerce replatforming. We’re going to be talking about business requirements capture and prioritisation.
It is absolutely essential before you start looking at the platforms and potential partners that you have a really succinct definition of what the business critical requirements are. This doesn’t mean create a huge three and a half thousand-point checklist of every single last functional element. That comes much later in the project when you’re doing function specifications.
There are so many things in platforms that are just good housekeeping, hygiene factors, for example having a Wishlist and the ability to create multiple Wishlists. A feature like this is highly unlikely to influence platform choice. What is going to influence a platform choice is the business critical capabilities which, depending on the platform you choose, could end up creating a lot of process hassle or additional cost if the platforms do not handle well natively out of the box those capabilities that you need. For example, integrations with ERPs.
So it’s really important that there is a process of stakeholder interview with the key stakeholders from your project team. What do they need from the ecommerce platform and ecosystem? So this means mapping out all of the stakeholders who should be influencing the capture of business critical requirements. This is not jut the ecommerce team who’ll be responsible for managing and trading the website but it’s also areas such as the finance team who’ll be responsible for business report and reconciliation, and the logistics side of the business. It means looking at order management, fulfilment, shipping, returns etc.
Define needs right the way down to retail teams when you’re working in an omni channel environment where those retail teams will have a dependency on the store integration, like click and collect ,or if there’s in store digital points of sale. So it’s essential to sit those people down with a structured interview guide. Ahead of meeting make them aware of what you’re doing and why and provide them with an interview guide that outlines the discussion points that you want to get through with them. Also give them a briefing on what you expect them to bring to the table for those sessions so they come prepared. That makes these sessions far more productive.
Off the back of this, the person leading the interviews, typically either the customer lead or the project manager, will document the requirements that are being captured and then review, edit and play those back to the business stakeholder so the business stakeholder can review, edit if needed and then sign off and say “Yes that’s an accurate statement of the business critical requirements”. These requirements can then be reviewed with senior managers and the Project Sponsor if needed depending on the size of the organisational project team. Fundamentally, captured requirements should be played back to the business sponsor to say , “This is our ground zero business critical requirements is there anything in here that you want to contend? Is there anything in here that doesn’t fit with our agreed definition of scope and our MVP approach to this project?”.
Make sure you use a consistent format for documenting requirements. Use cases and user stories are proven ways to do this and the added value is that they can be expanded when moving into project delivery to create the detailed user stories to feed the development sprints.
Your documented business requirements are the elements you will then take forward to the next step of the project, which is going to be platform evaluation and shortlisting. So it’s really important there is a structured process, an agreed format for documentation, and that you also define your business prioritisation because you can then ensure that a business critical requirement is genuinely a business critical requirement.
Hopefully that’s given you some useful insights that you can take away, thank you.
Other videos in the series
- Project set-up and governance
- Project budgeting and scope
- Project management essentials
- Platform selection
- Building a TCO (total cost of ownership) financial model
- Platform due diligence
- Partner selection RFP
- Partner due diligence
- Common risks and how to mitigate
Who is this for?
Anybody committed to, or planning for, an ecommerce replatform/platform migration, especially the following roles:
- Project sponsor: C-suite, Directors of Digital, Ecommerce and Multi-Channel.
- Project owner: senior management e.g. Head of Ecommerce, Digital Manager.
- Project stakeholder: subject matter experts e.g. SEO Manager.
- Project Manager: contract or FT in-house PM.
- Agencies: Client account Director or Managers.
Visit my Ecommerce Replatforming Video Masterclass landing page to learn what this series is about and the value it can provide to your business.
Want to learn more?
If you have any questions, or would like to discuss how Digital Juggler can support your ecommerce replatform project, please contact us today.
Related resources
Downloadable replatforming checklist
Our ecommerce replatforming checklist is a step-by-step guide for ecommerce platform vendor selection and implementation agency (systems integrator) RFP process. Available as a detailed step-by-step online guide or via PDF download.
Re:platform Podcast
Weekly ecommerce podcast hosted by James Gurd and fellow experienced digital consultant Paul Rogers. Featuring interviews with industry thought leaders and practical advice on improving end-to-end customer experience, discover how to make better technology decisions.