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Business Analysis
PMI Guide to Business Analysis · BA for Practitioners (2nd ed.) · Requirements Management
Somebody hands you a problem. This is the route from that to authorized work — or to an honest decision that it should never become a project at all.
Describe the work in your own words — what you are running, where you are stuck, what you have to put in front of someone. You will get a shortlist back straight away.
Each gate produces something the next one needs. The exit test is what tells you it is finished — not your sense that you have done enough thinking about it.
The ask, in the requester’s own words. Capture before you improve — cleaning up the phrasing is how the real problem gets lost. Park the solution they already assumed; it re-enters at G4 and competes on merit like everything else.
A statement with no solution and no blame in it. A missing thing is a solution in disguise: “orders are re-keyed by hand” is a problem, “we don’t have integration” is a solution wearing a problem’s coat.
Evidence, baseline measures, root cause, and the boundary of the affected system. Push past the first answer — “people forget” is a symptom of a design that requires remembering, not a cause. Record what you ruled out; that is what stops the debate reopening in month four.
Measurable objectives, capability gaps, and a named benefit with a named owner. The benefit is not the deliverable — “a working integration” is a deliverable, “order errors stop reaching customers” is a benefit. Then the question that separates projects from programs: who sustains it after delivery?
Three or more options, one of which is always “change nothing” — carrying a real number, because without it every other option looks expensive and the comparison is theatre. Argue the recommendation against the runner-up, and name the condition that would change your mind.
The question almost nobody asks out loud: is this even a project? Seven questions, scored below. Project, program, process fix, or decline.
The decision package — someone should be able to say yes or no from this alone. Test for including an assumption: if it were false, would the answer change? If not, cut it.
Everything carries forward unchanged. Two sections earn their keep above the rest: explicitly out of scope — every refusal here is a change request you do not fight in month five — and authority granted, because a charter that grants none has not chartered anything.
A signature, and a live traceability line. Every requirement traces backward to an objective and forward to an acceptance criterion. Anything tracing to nothing is not scope — delete the row, or find the objective it serves. Those are the only two honest options.
No gate may be skipped, but any gate may be answered thin — as long as you write down what the thinness costs. “We have no baseline and cannot get one before the funding date; the risk is that we will not be able to prove the benefit” is a legitimate answer. A blank is not.
Score each question from the evidence you gathered, not from the requester’s enthusiasm. Size appears nowhere here on purpose — a big project is still a project.
Score every question and the verdict resolves itself. The two overrides below the questions can beat the total.
Prefer to be walked through it one question at a time? Take the guided version →
Everything the template forge can build, and the standard each one is grounded in. Filter by the credential you are working in.
● Ready now · everything else is built to order
PMI Guide to Business Analysis · BA for Practitioners (2nd ed.) · Requirements Management
PMBOK 8 Initiating focus area · PgMP 5 Definition phase
PMBOK 8 Scope domain · Practice Standard for WBS
Practice Standard for Scheduling · for Project Estimating
PMBOK 8 Finance domain · The Standard for Earned Value Management
The Standard for Risk Management · Risk Management practice guide
PMBOK 8 Stakeholders domain · PgMP Stakeholder Engagement
PMBOK 8 Resources domain
Governance of Portfolios, Programs & Projects · Managing Change · Configuration Management
Benefits Realization Management · PgMP Benefits Management
Agile Practice Guide · Choose Your WOW
The Standard for AI in Portfolio, Program & Project Management
The Standard for Program Management (5th ed.)
The Standard for Portfolio Management · PfMP — deprioritized for now
Navigating Complexity practice guide
PMBOK 8 Closing focus area · PgMP Closure phase
Four files ready to download today. The sixteen lanes above are the rest of the catalog — built to order, for your project, at your level.
All eight gates as tabs, with the routing test scored live in the sheet and a worked example in every grid.
Fifteen sections, guidance under every field, signature block. Four pages.
Benefits register, component roadmap, governance framework, and the synergy statement that justifies the program’s existence.
Two pages, for the things that are real, worth fixing, and should never become a project.
The workbook that runs all eight gates, plus three templates: a project charter, a program charter, and a process fix brief for the things that should never be chartered. Built from the PMI standards, written in plain English, yours to use on Monday.
prajekt — Prajekt Manijer LLC · prajekt.com
Sequence and vocabulary aligned to the PMI Guide to Business Analysis, the PMBOK Guide (8th ed.) and The Standard for Program Management (5th ed.). All wording original; no PMI text, table or figure is reproduced.