Once the requirements have been verified, it is time to validate them.
The validate requirements activity is used to ensure that all the requirements and design that have been created are in line with the business requirements and that they fulfill the future state of the organization.
The requirements validation activity happens on throughout the life cycle of the project to ensure that the stakeholders, solution and transition requirements are aligned with the business requirements and designs.
It is used to help the stakeholders visualize the future state of the solution.
Even though the stakeholders might think they know what the future state should be, seeing it stated in simpler terms might help them identify gaps which they might not have previously foreseen.
There are three elements which are used in the validate requirements activity and these elements are :
1. Identify Assumptions: if a new product is being launched it might be difficult to gauge the stakeholders reaction to this product. It might also be difficult to foresee any issues associated with the implementation of said product.
This could lead to assumptions based on what the product can do and these might be incorrect. So it is important to identify any assumptions and manage the expectations of the stakeholders.
2. Define Measurable Evaluation Criteria: implementing the solution is supposed to come with benefits to the organization but it might be difficult to measure these benefits if there is no evaluation criteria which can be used to do so.
So its the job of the business analyst to define the evaluation criteria which would be used to measure the success of the solution. A baseline metric would have to be established based on the current state of the organization.
3. Evaluate Alignment with Solution Scope: Some solutions come with standard functionalities which would be nice to have but might not have been a requirement of the stakeholders.
These functionalities should be considered for elimination because if the stakeholders keep adding nice to have requirements to the requirements list the future state of the solution would have to be reevaluated and the solution scope would also have to be changed.
This is because any changes made at a later stage in the life cycle of the project would have to be analyzed for its impact on the proposed solution. So if a design cannot be matched to a stated requirement then there might be missing requirements or the designs would have to be changed.