From the course: Business Analysis Foundations

Requirements elicitation techniques

From the course: Business Analysis Foundations

Requirements elicitation techniques

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- There are lots of ways to do elicitation, and you'll want to customize your strategy to each situation. Different stakeholders mean different elicitation techniques. One common technique uses structured or facilitated sessions. You have a facilitator that guides the conversation of the participants, prompts brainstorming, and makes sure that the session fulfills its goal. Facilitated workshops are great for a couple of reasons. One, they can be used throughout the project. It allows us to make the elicitation process truly iterative. Two, you can bring cross-functional participants together. Having diverse participants naturally uncovers gaps, redundancies, needs, and other important information. Finally, having a facilitator means someone is there to help with communication between stakeholders, leading to better relationships and consensus. Interviews have been used for years. They're basically three loose categories of interview styles. Highly structured, with predefined questions. Semi-structured, with some prepared questions, and follow up on answers or, unstructured interviews where you allow the conversation to develop naturally. These are most appropriate when confidential or sensitive information is needed, or the information is needed from high level managers. You can do these face to face, over the phone, video conferences, through email, or even have the person record the responses into an audio file. In addition, we collect and analyze existing documentation. A major focus of our analysis is to ask, "Why certain information is even there?" The answer, "Because it's always been done that way," is not a valid response. What I've often done is have the stakeholders take the documentation of a process, and literally circle what they use or don't. It can be a really revealing process for them and it's a quick way for me to get to the heart of what matters and what doesn't. You could also try shadowing people in their environment while performing their duties. If you have a large number of stakeholders use questionnaires and surveys. Remember though that open-ended questions obtain more detailed responses, but will require additional time to consolidate. One word of caution here, the process can get very lengthy. You want to be thorough, but don't fall into analysis paralysis. Constrain yourself to two phases. One, initial elicitation during the needs assessment activities. A second discovery is done after the project has been initiated. It's an iterative process. Okay. You have to choose your elicitation techniques. This is what you should consider, the type of project and approach used, time and budget constraints, number and location of stakeholders, and requirement documentation type and detail required. So regardless of the technique you choose, elicitation activities take up project resources. So choose wisely so your time spent appropriately defines the product solution.

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