Creating the Statement of Requirements
To avoid the pitfalls previously outlined, we recommend that you address the following as a starting point for the Statement of Requirements:
Justify each item.
You must be able to justify why you have included an item; otherwise why it is included in the specification? To assist in this, it is helpful to state a Purpose at the top of the requirements section. This helps to constantly focus on the Strategic (Why?) considerations that are often overlooked. It is also worth listing definitions that will help understand the detailed requirements - for example, stating what is meant by terminology such as Course and Unit with the context of an Academic Programme.Think "Out of the Box".
A Process Review should have already provided you with a list of requirements that encapsulate what you want to do rather than just what you do now (see our Process Review infoKit for further details). It is also worth stating any existing critical constraints alongside the Purpose and Definitions within the requirements section, again as a way of focusing on the new requirements.Decide Priorities.
Decide what is a must and then what (if any) requirements you could manage without for a brief period of time; which of these you may be able to produce yourself, agree with your prospective vendor or a third party for these to be written, or source a package that will interface readily with your other systems. This exercise can often help eliminate items if the justification isn't there!
As well as considering requirements in the three broad categories (General, Technical, Functional) it can be helpful to further sub-divide up the requirements into smaller chunks - for example: Data Management, Data Input, Data Output, Configuration and Usability. This helps to focus appropriate input from the relevant constituents, balancing between business specialists, technical staff and end-users. It also promotes consistency between the separate strands of requirements - for example if your Statement of Requirements includes a section for Admissions as well as Enrolment you are likely to want data output in the same formats for both.
To view a checklist aimed to assist in the compilation of a Statement of Requirements please use the following link, Statement of Requirements Checklist
Defining the requirements for a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is much the same as for a business information system. As with business systems, you should start with a definition of your requirements before investigating VLEs that are commercially available.
To view an example statement of requirements for a VLE in Excel format please use the following link, Statement of Requirements for a VLE.
The University of Bangor has produced a useful report at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=mle_related_vle that details the functionality that was identified for its VLE.
The EduTools project set up to support HE institutions in Canada has produced a web site that provides a useful comparison of VLE products at: http://www.edutools.info/course/compare/all.jsp.
The JISC web site also has some documents relating to VLE/MLE (Managed Learning Environment) specification checklists/selection.
