Chapter 5

Requirements Elicitation Meetings

In This Chapter:

• Challenges

• Roles and Responsibilities

• Individual and Small Group Interviews

• Facilitated Requirements Elicitation Workshops

Requirements elicitation involves conducting initial requirements-gathering sessions with customers, users, and stakeholders to begin the documentation process. Requirements-gathering techniques include discovery sessions, facilitated workshops, interviews, surveys, prototyping, review of existing system and business documents, and note-taking and feedback loops to customers, users, and stakeholders.

The purposes of requirements elicitation are to:

• Identify the customers, users, and stakeholders to determine who should be involved in the requirements-gathering process

• Understand the business goals and objectives and identify the essential user tasks that support the organizational goals

• Identify and define requirements to understand the needs of the users, customers, and stakeholders

The first iterations of the business requirements document and the requirements management plan are the key outputs of this activity. A well-planned and executed set of requirements elicitation activities forms the foundation for requirements analysis, specification, documentation, and validation.

Challenges

Several challenges are associated with requirements elicitation, including:

• Securing adequate time and the appropriate resources for elicitation activities

• Building requirements from the top down so that the requirements team understands the big picture

Roles and Responsibilities

The following roles and responsibilities apply to requirements elicitation activities:

• Project sponsor. Authorizes and funds the requirements elicitation activities.

• Facilitator. Designs, plans, and leads the elicitation sessions using effective facilitation and business analysis skills, tools, and techniques.

• Business analyst. The business analyst is a core project team member who leads stakeholder representatives to elicit, analyze, specify, validate, and manage project requirements throughout the life cycle.

• Project team. Contribute to the discovery of requirements and begin building relationships with key stakeholders.

• Requirements team. Support the elicitation, analysis, documentation, specification, and validation of requirements.

• Business users and subject matter experts. Contribute to the discovery of requirements needed to solve the business problem and seize the new business opportunity.

• Scribe. Captures and documents the work results of elicitation sessions. The person in this role is often skilled in requirements analysis and modeling tools.

The requirements elicitation meetings discussed in detail in this chapter include:

• Individual and small group interviews

• Facilitated requirements elicitation workshops

Individual and Small Group Interviews

Interviews are conducted with members of management and subject matter experts of the business area undergoing change, and with members of the performing organization that will develop the solution. The objectives of the interviews are to gain an initial understanding of the scope of the project and to capture any management-level assumptions and constraints. In addition, the business analyst presents the requirements activities and plans, and secures approval to use resources in the requirements activities.

Once approval is secured to begin the requirements elicitation process, the business analyst conducts small-group or one-on-one interviews to begin to draft high-level requirements documentation. This might include documenting the scope of requirements, preparing a high-level context diagram (also referred to as a super system model), or identifying functional requirements categories (sometimes documented as use case names). The business analyst begins to draft the glossary of terms as well.

Purpose and Benefits

Interviewing management and small groups of experts helps to:

• Obtain management approval to invite people to participate in requirements elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation activities

• Build draft documentation to be used as a starting point when conducting formal workshops and review sessions

Challenges

Key challenges include:

• Getting time on the calendars of the functional managers that own the resources

• Making the business case and securing management approval for dedicated resources for the full scope of requirements activities

• Identifying all relevant project stakeholders

Who Should Attend?

Typically, some or all of the core project team—consisting of the business analyst, the business representative, the technical lead, and the project manager—attend initial requirements elicitation interviews.

Meeting Strategy

The business analyst and project manager meet with their immediate supervisors to identify key management and subject matter experts and secure approval to schedule time on their calendars. Management interview preparation and execution steps include:

1. Prepare for the interview

   • Carefully review the business case and project charter documents. Identify any questions, gaps, or ambiguities that need clarification.

   • Determine the composition of the interview team. The interview team should include at least two people but no more than three.

   • Define the interview team roles. The roles include questioner (there should be one main questioner), note taker, observer, and timekeeper.

   • Determine the interview strategy, including key areas to discuss, specific questions for individuals, time to spend on each area or question, specific documents to review or discuss.

   • Prepare the interview agenda, capturing each area of discussion.

2. Conduct the interview

   • Begin the interview by putting the interviewee at ease. It is usually desirable to conduct the interview in a private office. Emphasize the confidentiality of the information. No comment will be attributed to any one person. Introduce the interview team. Ask the interviewee to introduce himself or herself and to brief you on his or her role in the project.

   • The business analyst or project manager typically leads the discussion. Anyone on the interview team may ask follow-up questions. Probe for and discuss management expectations, business problems or needs, understanding of the project scope, time, cost, and other constraints. Determine the manager’s understanding of the priority among the elements of the triple constraint—time, cost, and scope/quality. End the interview by asking open-ended questions.

3. Debrief

   • Immediately after the interview, the business analyst facilitates a discussion with the interview team to arrive at consensus on the information gleaned from the interview. The note taker integrates comments from the debriefing session into the notes.

   • The note taker documents the results of the interview in the form of an interview report; presents the report to the interview team for their comments, recommendations, and refinement; and updates the report with the feedback.

   • The business analyst incorporates the information in the interview report into the business requirements document or the requirements management plan.

Inputs

• Business case

• Project charter

Outputs

• Stakeholder list and analysis of stakeholders’ influence and expertise

• Interview notes

• Draft business requirements document, requirements management plan, and context diagram prepared from information gleaned during the interviews

Facilitator Agenda

The agenda for interviews must be customized for each person or group to be interviewed. Design your agenda to maximize information discovery and support. A sample agenda is shown in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1—Management Interview Facilitator Agenda

Facilitated Requirements Elicitation Workshops

The requirements elicitation workshop is perhaps the most important event planned and facilitated by the business analyst. According to Ellen Gottesdiener, a requirements workshop is a structured meeting in which a carefully selected group of stakeholders and content experts work together to define, create, refine, and reach closure on deliverables such as models and documents that represent user requirements.¹ The requirements workshop is similar to the joint application design (JAD) workshop developed by IBM in the late 1970s to help groups to build high-quality requirements and design deliverables.

Purpose and Benefits

Using structured workshops to progressively elaborate requirements can:

• Bring together project stakeholders, including customers, users, and developers

• Encourage team communication, decision-making, and a common understanding of the business area undergoing change and the nature of the change

• Validate the scope of work

• Define business requirements collaboratively

• Reach an agreement or consensus on the recommended solution

Challenges

Challenges encountered when planning and conducting requirements workshops include:

• Determining whether requirements workshops are appropriate for the project (workshops are not recommended for small, low-risk projects)

• Planning sufficiently, including the number of workshops and deliverables produced at each workshop

• Selecting effective workshop facilitation and requirements documentation techniques

• Ensuring that the right participants are present and actively involved in each workshop

• Managing participant behaviors and hidden agendas

• Managing time throughout the workshop to ensure that desired deliverables are produced

Who Should Attend?

Requirements elicitation meetings are planned and facilitated by the business analyst and assisted by a scribe who is proficient in capturing information in real time. These are usually relatively large workshops with key business and technical subject matter experts in attendance, including:

• Project sponsor to kick off the workshop

• Requirements team members

• Core project team members (project manager, business analyst, technical lead, business visionary)

• Key sources for requirements such as internal and external business users and business and technical subject matter experts

Meeting Strategy

Typically the project manager conducts a project kickoff workshop to formally launch the project and define the project charter, scope, objectives, assumptions, and constraints. The business analyst then plans and facilitates requirements elicitation workshops in a top-down manner to progressively elaborate the requirements. It is recommended that the business analyst:

• Spend considerable time planning for the workshop with the core project team members.

• Design a sequence of activities to progressively elaborate requirements, deliver the selected requirements artifacts, and foster mutual learning, understanding, consensus, and teamwork.

• Kick off the meeting, set expectations, and establish a collaborative atmosphere.

• Begin with a project overview and set scope boundaries (for the first workshop, perhaps the project manager or project sponsor also presents broad project information).

• Ensure full participation by helping participants build relationships; taking advantage of the expertise, styles. and contributions of each person; and building a high-performing team.

• If using use cases to define requirements, the business analyst would likely conduct three tiers of workshops. At the workshop, an effective approach is to divide the participants into break-out groups of five to nine people to develop:

  • Tier 1 Workshop—the scope of requirements in terms of context diagram, use case names, and a glossary of terms

  • Tier 2 Workshop—the high-level requirements in terms of a description of use cases, business rules, and scenarios

  • Tier 3 Workshop—the detailed requirements in terms of detailed scenarios, domain models, and prototype screens

• The break-out groups then report back to the full requirements team, and the business analyst facilitates a discussion to elicit comments, suggestions, and refinement. The facilitator works with the group to ensure that the content is at the right level of detail and degree of quality, and that consensus is achieved.

Inputs

• Business case

• Project charter

• Interview notes

• Draft business requirements document, requirements management plan, and context diagram prepared from information gleaned during the interviews

Outputs

• Draft business requirements documents and artifacts

• Updated stakeholder analysis

• Documented issues, risks, assumptions, constraints, and action items

• Schedule of remaining requirements activities

Facilitator Agenda

The agenda for a requirements elicitation workshop must be customized for each project. Design your agenda to maximize information discovery, creation, and elaboration. A sample agenda for an elicitation session using the case approach is shown in Figure 5-2.

Figure 5-2—Requirements Elicitation Workshop Facilitator Agenda