Eliciting and Documenting Requirements

A critical success factor to perform business analysis is the ability to elicit requirements from the perspective of business need and effectively communicate the requirements to stakeholders. This means that a business analyst must have excellent communication skills and have the ability to use techniques that make elicitation and communication of requirements most effective.

This workshop serves to provide business analysts with an understanding of facilitation best practices for planning/preparing, conducting, and performing follow-up for facilitation sessions in order to elicit or validate requirements.

The format of the workshop will be interactive and collaborative. It will serve to provide hands-on workshop discussions/ exercises to ensure a sound understanding of how to effectively:

• Prepare for and plan a facilitated session to ensure that it runs smoothly and that the goals are met.
• Orchestrate and conduct a requirements facilitation session as a proficient BA facilitator.
• Deal with participant behavior during facilitated sessions.
• Employ techniques to encourage participation, gain consensus, and keep the session moving forward.
• Employ techniques/models to guide the elicitation and validation of the requirements.

Writing effective requirements is one of the biggest challenges that a business analyst faces. They must be correct, complete, unambiguous, and testable, to name some of the key characteristics of a “good” requirement statement.

The format of this workshop is interactive and collaborative. It will serve to provide hands-on workshop discussions/exercises to ensure a sound understanding of what the different types of requirements are, how to identify requirements, what the characteristics of effective requirements are, and how to write them so that they are clear, complete, concise, unambiguous, and, most importantly, testable. Requirements statements will be written based upon a case study and reviewed/critiqued by participants as a means of understanding how challenging requirements specification can be. Real-world examples will be provided along with guidelines for how to better ensure that your requirements are well written.