It seems like we have been launching a lot of new business analysis projects recently and so we decided to take some time to really think about what are all of the things you do to launch the software requirements effort on a project. I started a checklist of activities that we need to complete in the first few weeks of a new business analysis project.

1. Hold a kick-off meeting with key stakeholders to meet each other, understand business objectives, and discuss the plan for the first two weeks
2. Hold a kick-off meeting with the full team to orient them to the work we are doing
3. Define team roles
4. Create a contact list for team members
5. Collect org charts for the entire organization
6. Gather existing documentation
7. Decide on the specific deliverables
8. Agree on the requirements architecture for the project, create a BDD to represent the requirements object artifacts
9. Decide where each of the artifacts will be stored/maintained
10. Setup information management for the requirements information (requirements tool, sharepoint, etc.)
11. Agree on how business analysis activities fit into the overall implementation methodology
12. Create a requirements plan
13. Setup a burndown report on requirements plan activities
14. Setup a burndown on budget
15. Setup issue tracking and appropriate reports
16. Agree on status reporting format, time, and who is involved
17. Agree on escalation paths

There are likely other things and we’ll revise this list, but for now I wanted to share it in case there are some things you haven’t remembered to do when starting your new project.