"Any application analysis project begins with understanding and documenting the users' business requirements. This is the only reason the organization will adopt the software and add it to its infrastructure. I spend a great deal of time understanding what the business users are trying to accomplish, the functionality they are looking for in an application, and how they plan to interact with the software. I carefully document this by creating a needs analysis. I then refer to this periodically while performing the application analysis to ensure that I understand the user needs and that the applications I'm examining address the business requirements. Suppose, for some reason, the application I've recommended fails to meet the users' needs. In that case, I refer back to the needs analysis document to determine why this happened and whether it was because I misunderstood the needs."
