About This Book

The goal of this book is to present principles and practices for pragmatic, effective requirements elicitation. This book is not an academic discussion of requirements-gathering practices, but rather is designed to provide critical information about why and how to plan elicitation activities and conduct elicitation sessions to capture accurate, complete, and useable business requirements. To elicit, according to Merriam-Webster,¹ is to draw out information or a response. In projects, requirements elicitation is the process of gaining an understanding of the business problem or opportunity through interaction with the actual users and other key stakeholders.

The purpose of elicitation is to gain consensus on the business need across the business units involved in the change and clarify and document the requirements in such a way that actionable information is provided to the solution development team. Organizations are increasingly interested in contemporary, advanced requirements management practices because of:

Continuing project failure. As discussed in Professionalizing Business Analysis: Breaking the Cycle of Challenged Projects, another volume in this series, inadequate requirements can account for 60–70% of projects that fail to deliver on time, on cost, and/or with the scope originally promised. Many studies show that improved documentation, communication, and management of requirements leads to increased project success.

Increasing use of outsourcing. Developers may be thousands of miles away from the project team that is managing the requirements. The need for comprehensive, clear, paper-based documentation is accentuated when teams are not co-located.

Expanding need for contractual documentation. Requirements are a commitment for performance. Vendors want to understand the scope of work so that they can make an informed commitment to completing the project successfully.

Increasing professionalism of the role of the business analyst. Project-based organizations in all types of industries are recognizing the need for professional business analysis.

The purpose of this book is to present simple but powerful techniques to plan and manage the requirements elicitation process. The book is structured into the following sections:

Part I: Introduction. This part provides a quick overview of requirements elicitation and defines some key business analysis terms.

Part II: Planning Requirements Activities. This part discusses the need for the business analyst to work collaboratively with the project manager and other core team members to create plans that customize the elicitation activities to the unique needs of the project.

Part III: Elicitation in Practice. This part discusses the primary techniques used by the business analyst and discusses which methods to use for specific project types.

The business analyst makes use of powerful tools and techniques to determine the real business need as part of solving business problems and seizing new business opportunities. This book is specifically aimed at helping the business analyst acquire the knowledge, skills, and competencies needed to be successful in both applying the tools and acquiring the mindset needed to successfully gather business requirements.

In the past, it has been thought that requirements elicitation, documentation, validation, and management are the easy part of project work and that development of the solution is the most difficult part. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the most elusive and challenging part of projects is getting requirements right. Applying the best practices presented in this book will result in:

Building the requirements plan to ensure the business need is determined

Scaling the requirements activities to the size, risk, and complexity of the project

Clarifying project terms that cause confusion to stakeholders

Selecting just the right amount of requirements activity for the project

Using powerful elicitation techniques to improve the requirements gathering process

Although the business analyst is the primary person responsible for requirements gathering, many project stakeholders benefit from improved requirements elicitation, knowledge, and skills, including:

Project managers, who schedule and manage requirements tasks

New product and service developers and testers, who build business solutions to meet the requirements

Sponsors, who validate that requirements are accurate and fund project efforts

Customers and users, who receive and operate the new business solutions

The requirements elicitation techniques that we discuss in this book apply in virtually all types of project environments and business change initiatives, including:

New business process development, including the development of supporting information technology (IT) systems

Business process and system enhancement

Infrastructure technology replacement

Business process improvement and reengineering

Organizational change management