Obtaining Sign-Off on the Requirements Baseline

A requirements baseline isn't final until the relevant stakeholders have actually agreed to it — this task uses decision-making techniques to work through any remaining disagreement and reach genuine consensus, not just a rushed approval from whoever happened to be in the room. A baseline signed off without real stakeholder buy-in tends to resurface as disputed scope later, when it's far more expensive to renegotiate.

Facilitating consensus doesn't mean everyone gets everything they wanted — it means disagreements were surfaced, discussed, and resolved (or consciously deferred) before the baseline was locked, rather than papered over to hit a deadline.

Study focus: a scenario where a stakeholder "signs off" under pressure, with an unresolved objection still on record, is testing whether that counts as genuine sign-off at all — it usually doesn't, and the BA's job is to catch that gap before it becomes a problem downstream.