Business requirements - or - how I became an expert on three systems in three days

Business Requirements

Well, not exactly an expert, but I certainly did learn a great deal very quickly.

As my manager gathered information on the system we would be replacing I was watching over her shoulder to get some advanced information on what systems we might be able to tap into.
KP has enough systems, you very rarely need to invent a new one. Chances are, someone, somewhere has bought or built a tool that would fit your need. We knew that we wanted to use an existing system, as we had no budget for licenses, setup or customization. We turned first to two HR systems - our LMS and our performance management system. We wanted to take advantage of the natural connections between training, development, coaching and performance management.
As the business requirements began to lay out, I began testing and examining our two HR systems for possible fits. I poked my head into offices of system experts, cornered system sponsors in the office hallways asking hypothetical questions. Like most folks who begin business requirements work, I thought I knew the solution to our issue. Naturally, I thought the LMS would be our best fit. I identified the "Learning Plan" functionality as the module that had the closest match. I scoped out the work, tested some scenarios in our sandbox environment, and even considered the evil of customizations of forcing the system to behave the way we needed it to.
The biggest issue lay in the fundamental mismatch in functionality. The LMS and performance management system were built for the partnership between the manager and the employee. We needed a system with two additional roles - Instructor and Coach.
What we needed was more of a community of interest - an open relationship between participants, managers, coaches and instructors. We needed web 2.0.

I had used the jive/clearspace KP-branded application "KP Ideabook" for some document sharing and to get a few answers on discussion boards. The idea was broached to try "KP Ideabook" against the business requirements, just after we had discussed web 2.0 applications and what they were capable of. After two days of intensive learning, testing and building a demo system, I was able to mark Ideabook against our other candidate systems. The results look very favorable and our small project team thought we had a hit. I mocked up a quick power point demo to present our findings and our recommendation to the project sponsors - the National Learning Leaders.
I was on PTO the day of the presentation, but received an email from my director upon my return:

"I wanted to let you know the presentation today was great. In fact, it was the only work from all the teams that we clearly have a go ahead to move forward on as outlined.

The deck was great and the slides of Ideabook screenshots were a real help.

Thanks to both of you for your excellent work. It is appreciated."

Awesome.