Requirements That Keep Moving
You are the business analyst on a customer onboarding portal for a regional bank. Six weeks into a 12-week discovery-and-design phase, you have 140 requirements documented. Change requests are arriving at roughly 15 per week, and 40% of them trace back to a single stakeholder group - the compliance team - whose representative joined late and whose regulatory interpretations conflict with what operations assumed. The operations lead has started approving requirements without compliance sign-off to keep velocity up, and two of those approved items are now disputed. The project sponsor wants the design phase to close on schedule. You have a requirements baseline scheduled for sign-off in two weeks.
1. What is the root cause of the churn, and what should you do before the baseline sign-off?
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The churn is not random scope creep; it is late stakeholder engagement plus unresolved conflict between two authoritative sources (compliance and operations). Fifteen changes a week with 40% from one late-arriving group is a signal that the requirements were elicited without the right authority in the room, and that regulatory interpretation was assumed rather than confirmed. The disputed approvals show the governance is already broken - operations is signing off on items it does not own.
Before baseline, you should:
- Escalate the governance gap, not just the individual disputes: establish that compliance sign-off is mandatory for any requirement touching regulatory behavior, and get that rule agreed by the sponsor in writing.
- Run a focused reconciliation session with compliance and operations on the disputed and compliance-tagged items to resolve interpretation conflicts at the source, rather than adjudicating them one change request at a time.
- Re-baseline honestly. A baseline signed over unresolved conflicts is worthless; recommend a short slip or a reduced baseline scope rather than a false sign-off.
The judgment: a baseline is only valuable if the authority behind it is real. Closing the phase on schedule by papering over a known conflict just moves the cost into build.
2. The sponsor says: "Freeze the requirements at baseline - no more changes." Evaluate this instruction.
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A hard freeze is the wrong instrument for this problem. It treats the symptom (change volume) rather than the cause (unresolved authority conflict and late engagement). If you freeze now, the 15-per-week changes do not disappear - they become post-baseline changes, which are more expensive, arrive with less context, and erode trust in the baseline itself. Worse, freezing would lock in the disputed items that operations approved without compliance, which is exactly the risk you are trying to close.
The better instruction is a controlled baseline: freeze only after the compliance/operations reconciliation is complete, and pair the freeze with a defined change control process - impact assessment, approval authority, and a threshold above which the sponsor is notified. That gives the sponsor the stability they want without pretending conflicts are resolved. The exam-relevant judgment is distinguishing a legitimate request for stability from a governance shortcut that defers cost.