Practical IT Infrastructure Design ① — From Requirements Analysis to the Design Input Specification

Have you received customer requirements but feel unsure where or how to start analyzing them? In real-world IT infrastructure design projects, customer requirements are rarely clearly defined from the outset. “The system must never go down.” “I want to see production status in real time.” “Please ensure smooth integration with our existing systems.” Statements like these alone aren’t enough to design infrastructure such as servers, networks, and storage. You first need to clarify what they mean, whose requirements they are, and under what conditions they need to be met. Over approximately 20 years working as a systems engineer and technical architect (TA) for organizations in finance, defense, manufacturing, broadcasting, and government, I’ve learned that just as important as the technical design is **the process of accurately eliciting and organizing the requirements needed for that design**. This course uses a hypothetical project to build a new MES for a manufacturing company to show how to turn unclear customer requests into documents that can be used in actual infrastructure design. Across 14 lessons, you’ll learn each step, from identifying stakeholders and conducting interviews and observations to classifying and analyzing requirements, determining priorities and scope, reconfirming requirements with the customer, creating a design input definition document, managing traceability, and handing over the baseline. This is not a course in simply memorizing concepts. Through hands-on exercises and completed examples, you’ll practice evaluating and documenting requirements, and learn how to create documents that can be used in real-world projects. **The goal of this course is not to make you someone who collects as many requirements as possible, but a practitioner who can organize what customers say into design inputs that downstream designers can understand and use right away.** ※ This course focuses on eliciting and analyzing requirements and documenting design inputs. It does not cover selecting server or network products, creating system architecture diagrams, or detailed infrastructure design.