A business requirement document (BRD) is like a blueprint for a new project or partnership — you can see the plan and imagine the final results at a glance. Indeed, a BRD communicates all of the most crucial elements of a project quickly. So, in a few minutes, a reader with no prior knowledge of the project understands the goals, requirements, scope, key players, timeline and budget.
Additionally, the business requirements document is flexible and can be used in a number of ways. For example, you can create a BRD to organize information, secure executive buy-in, communicate expectations during vendor onboarding, align project teams and win budget. Consequently, knowing how to write a BRD is a valuable skill for procurement managers, project managers, department heads and team leaders.
For a business requirements document to be clear and successful, many factors must be carefully considered and included. In this article, we’ll explore what a business requirements document is and examples of how it’s used. We’ll also offer a section-by-section guide for how to write a business requirements document, and we’ll share what it looks like in an RFP management system. Finally, we’ll share our favorite BRD template (and others) as well as several examples to get you started.
A business requirements document, or BRD, is a formal document that outlines a project and includes an overview, goals, scope, key stakeholders, requirements, potential risks or challenges and budget.
The core purpose of a business requirements document is to communicate important information quickly and clearly. Consequently, it comes in handy for planning projects, purchases or process changes — when it’s crucial that everyone involved understands the context, needs and ideal outcomes. Taking time to formalize and share your plan has a number of benefits.
A well-executed BRD can:
Professionals in a variety of roles use business requirements documents. Because of the time and thought required to create a thorough BRD, it’s best suited to high-impact or high-value projects.
When undertaking an important procurement project, procurement managers must gather, organize and communicate a lot of information. While working with stakeholders to understand the need, impact and budget required for a future purchase, a BRD helps guide conversations. Additionally, it identifies key stakeholder roles and ensures that every requirement is accounted for.
After interviews, procurement managers condense the information collected from stakeholders into a business requirements document, later leveraging it to write a request for proposal (RFP). Alternatively, the BRD may be provided as an attachment to the RFP to help set expectations with a vendor.
There’s no doubt, change is hard. However, you can use a BRD to make the process easier. If you need to announce an upcoming change to potentially reluctant participants, a BRD is a great first step.
Certainly, the format of the business requirements document answers key questions like: What’s the planned change? Why is it happening? What is needed for success? And, who is involved? While you’ll need to provide additional detail to stakeholders, a thoughtful BRD quickly explains and reassures during difficult changes.
IT projects are one of the most common use cases for business requirements documents. The process enables teams to communicate complex, highly-technical projects quickly and simply. For example, you’ll find many sample business requirements documents for software development, website creation, API development, data migration and more.
Often confused and used interchangeably, a business requirements document and functional requirements document serve different purposes. So, what’s the difference between a BRD and FRD?
A BRD deals with what an organization hopes to achieve through a vendor partnership. On the other hand, a functional requirements document (FRD) deals with how they expect to achieve it.
For example, imagine an organization that’s recently purchased an applicant tracking system to help with their recruiting efforts. They might use a BRD to explain that they expect to increase their candidate pipeline by 10 percent. Then, they might create an FRD to detail how they expect to achieve that goal — perhaps through integrations with popular job boards. To learn more about FRDs check out this blog.
So, how exactly do you write a BRD that effectively informs your team or vendor about the outcomes and expectations you have around a project? First, you have to have the right components.
While each BRD is unique, they generally contain a few common sections. You’ll find each of these sections in our downloadable business development requirements template.
The executive summary sets the stage for the entire document. In fact, this is the first section your team or vendors will read. So, make sure you hold their attention and quickly convey all the necessary information. Essentially, the executive summary should set the stage for the BRD.
See how the executive summary looks in RFP360.
In this section, you’ll go into detail about the project. Certainly there’s a lot of ground to cover in this section. For example, you can explore challenges, the current process and business drivers.
See how a project overview looks in RFP360.
What will your project accomplish? If you’re trying to win buy-in or set performance expectations with vendors, this section is particularly important.
Generally, we recommend using SMART goals — which are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Not only will this will help you effectively communicate your expectations with your vendor but it also provides a simple way to evaluate success when you finish the project. You can learn more about SMART goals in this blog from FitSmallBusiness.com.
Here is where you’ll cover your needs in greater detail. While brainstorming your business requirements, consider your priorities. For example, designate each of your requirements as critical, high priority, medium priority, low priority or a future requirement. Ultimately, you’ll need to assign importance to each in your final BRD.
See how to define your business requirements in RFP360.
The project scope is one of the most important sections in your BRD. This will explain what your organization is responsible for and external participants or vendors are responsible for.
Remember, be as detailed as possible, and don’t make any assumptions. Unfortunately, when misunderstandings with your team or a vendor arise over the course of a project, you can usually trace them back to a vague or confusing project scope.
See how to outline your project scope in RFP360.
Similar to an RFP timeline, your BRD timeline should outline key milestones and expected delivery dates. Consider if some steps of your process can happen concurrently to speed things up. Alternatively, identify dependencies that need to happen before the project can proceed.
Itemize your costs in this section of your BRD. Then, quantify the value you expect to receive so you can calculate your project’s return on investment. In addition, you may want to include details about where the funding will come from and who has final approval.
Try to use common language as much as possible within your business requirements document. However, that’s not always possible. Use this section to define any terms the reader might not understand. For instance, if you’re using terminology specific to your business, industry jargon or acronyms, this section is crucial to effectively communicate your requirements to your team and vendors.
See how to create a glossary in RFP360.
Interested in seeing how RFP360 could improve your business requirements document and procurement processes? You can see it for yourself — schedule a demo now.
One of the benefits of using BRDs consistently is the ability to optimize based on past results. Explore previous projects. Then, fine-tune what worked well and adjust what didn’t. Did you get a lot of questions about the timeline? Add more detail to then next one. Were there a lot of additions and changes? Consider which stakeholders should be more involved.
To be effective, your BDR should be as brief as possible. So, as you write, inspect each section and ensure that you’re providing the right information for right now. Don’t get into the weeds with details that won’t be relevant to the reader until the project is nearly done. In addition, when detailing your needs avoid creating bullet points that contain more than one requirement.
Make sure your requirements are crystal clear and direct. Using strong language like ‘shall,’ ‘will’ and ‘should’ rather than weaker options like ‘if possible,’ ‘except if’ and ‘if necessary.’ In addition, your BRD should be precise when describing requirements, omitting estimates and approximations. Finally, be sure to check your document for any contradictions or duplications that may confuse the reader.
Your BRD deadlines should reflect the current state of your organization rather than an idealized version. Consult with stakeholders, ask about their current workloads and where this project would fall in their list of priorities. Make sure that you give participants the time they to do their best work at each step. After all, it’s always better to deliver ahead of schedule instead of late.
One of the benefits of using BRDs consistently is the ability to optimize based on past results. Explore previous projects. Then, fine-tune what worked well and adjust what didn’t. Did you get a lot of questions about the timeline? Add more detail to then next one. Were there a lot of additions and changes? Consider which stakeholders should be more involved.
To be effective, your BDR should be as brief as possible. So, as you write, inspect each section and ensure that you’re providing the right information for right now. Don’t get into the weeds with details that won’t be relevant to the reader until the project is nearly done. In addition, when detailing your needs avoid creating bullet points that contain more than one requirement.
Make sure your requirements are crystal clear and direct. Using strong language like ‘shall,’ ‘will’ and ‘should’ rather than weaker options like ‘if possible,’ ‘except if’ and ‘if necessary.’ In addition, your BRD should be precise when describing requirements, omitting estimates and approximations. Finally, be sure to check your document for any contradictions or duplications that may confuse the reader.
Your BRD deadlines should reflect the current state of your organization rather than an idealized version. Consult with stakeholders, ask about their current workloads and where this project would fall in their list of priorities. Make sure that you give participants the time they to do their best work at each step. After all, it’s always better to deliver ahead of schedule instead of late.
Share your draft BRD with a trusted colleague and ask them to provide feedback. They should be able to entirely understand the project and scope with little previous context. In addition, ask them to look for any unexplained jargon or acronyms, areas that need more or less explanation and any potential gaps in the process.
Share your draft BRD with a trusted colleague and ask them to provide feedback. They should be able to entirely understand the project and scope with little previous context. In addition, ask them to look for any unexplained jargon or acronyms, areas that need more or less explanation and any potential gaps in the process.
Every organization, partnership and project is unique. From simple to highly-complex projects, you’ll find a template to fit your needs in this collection.
However, it’s important to keep template best practices in mind — carefully review and customize before sending. Indeed, ensure your BRD captures the intricacies of your specific requirements. Use the templates below as a starting place, but make edits when needed and remove sections or information that’s not relevant to your use case.
This business requirements document template is a quick and easy guide to creating your own BRD. In the template you’ll find the sections including executive summary, project overview and objectives, business requirements, project scope and glossary. Along with each section you’ll see handy tips and guidance for how to use them. If you use RFP software, you can use these sections, rearrange them and create custom BRDs easily.
Download the business requirements document template.
San Francisco State University (SFSU) created this three-page BRD template. It’s fairly short, so you can use it to convey your requirements for simple projects. For this reason, this format is best when you only need a small amount of detail before proceeding. A great option for quick projects.
This PandaDoc BRD template guide includes 13 sections — and tips for how to best prepare each one. For example, in the executive summary, the document offers the following advice:
“An executive summary should be no more than three paragraphs long and should provide a concise summary of the purpose and contents of the rest of the document. It is usually best to draft this section last.
TechWhirl’s BRD template is primarily designed for a technology project. It includes several charts and spreadsheets to document edits, revisions, approvals, requirements and more. In addition, it contains brief descriptions of the information each section should contain, as well as examples of how to present that information.
For example, in the objectives section, it explains:
“These should describe the overall goal in developing the product, high level descriptions of what the product will do, how they are aligned to business objectives, and the requirements for interaction with other systems.”
Directly below this description, it offers the following example:
The RequirementsExperts template is a nice option if you prefer working in Excel over Word. In addition, each section includes a short description of the information needed.
The spreadsheet consists tabs for the following sections:
The BRD template from British Columbia includes black text intended to remain in the final document. Similarly, it includes red text that contains instructions or examples. This text is meant to be deleted and replaced with the information specific to your requirements.
This T System BRD template contains 11 pages full of spreadsheets, charts and boilerplate content. Included are examples and flow charts to help provide guidance for creating your own. Unfortunately, the template isn’t downloadable. However, it does provide excellent inspiration.
This template from New York University is fairly advanced. Notably, it includes version tracking charts, spreadsheets, diagrams, and blue-highlighted text, which indicates where to insert your specific requirements.
Because of the detail this template covers, it’s probably not a good choice for those creating their first BRD. But, if you’re experienced creating BRDs and want to cover all of your bases, this is a great option.
DatabaseStar’s BRD template contains 12 sections over 14 pages. Luckily, each section includes detailed instructions about the information you should include. Uniquely, this document also covers functional requirements, which may not be necessary for every project.
While templates can give you a great starting point, chances are you could use some extra help. Especially if you’re writing your first BRD. The first thing to remember is you have to make it work for your business.
The BRD examples listed below show what an effective BRD looks like. In addition, they also provide direction as you start documenting your own requirements.
Simplicable created “an illustrative example of a business requirements document for a system project undertaken by a fictional telecom company.”
It includes the following seven sections:
In each section, they demonstrate how their fictional telecom company, Neverland Telecom, would outline their requirements. For example, in the Business Case section, they use the chart below to outline the goals and objectives.
This BRD example outlines the goals and expectations of a website redesign definition. The example uses a marketing agency completing the redesign for GLSEN.
Consequently, the document explains the purpose.
“…to express the requirements of the customers and stakeholders to be served by the deliverables of the project—the perceived customer wants and needs for a product, system, or service.”
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) created a BRD to help create “a standard process for airlines to distribute product offers created within their own systems and to manage the resulting orders.”
Uniquely this example includes highly-detailed explanations and charts. It is perfect for those who need some inspiration to create a highly technical or detailed BRD.
The Department of Veterans Affairs explains the purpose of this BRD below.
“The Business Requirements Document (BRD) is authored by the business community for the purpose of capturing and describing the business needs of the customer/business owner. The BRD provides insight into the AS-IS and TO-BE business area, identifying stakeholders and profiling primary and secondary user communities. It identifies what capabilities the stakeholders and the target users need and why these needs exist, providing a focused overview of the requirements, constraints, and Information Technology (IT) options considered. This document does not state the development methodology. The intended audience for this document is the Office of Information and Technology (OIT).”
This BRD example is great for organizations who want to see how to outline very technical and stringent project requirements.
While BRDs are similar to many RFx documents — including requests for proposals (RFPs), requests for information (RFIs), requests for quotations (RFQs), and more — they do serve a distinct purpose.
Here’s how The Balance Small Business explains the difference between BRDs and procurement documents like RFPs.
“Typically, a request for proposal (RFP) is created for the purpose of soliciting proposals from various vendors.
“A BRD, on the other hand, is prepared for a specific vendor or joint venture partner who has already been selected by the hiring company. The BRD contains more details and more specifications and deadlines to be met along the way and at the end of the project.”
Put simply, RFx documents are used to identify which vendors your organization wants to partner with. Then, BRDs outline the goals and expectations you have for the vendor you ultimately select. Certainly each process and document has a place in the procurement team’s tool box. In addition, each RFP process can be simplified and accelerated using RFP automation.
RFP360 supports strategic vendor partnerships with capabilities that empower you to issue better RFPs and questionnaires.
Specifically, RFP management systems empower your team with:
