Elicitation and Collaboration Workshop - Online

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Course Description:

In this business analysis training course you will learn how to ensure the effectiveness of your requirements foundation with a structured, standardized approach to eliciting real-world requirements.

Requirements elicitation is one of the most challenging activities of business engineering activities. Because the requirements serve as the foundation for the solution to the business needs it is essential that the requirements be complete, clear, correct, and consistent. Leveraging proven means to elicit requirements will help meet these quality goals. Requirements elicitation involves identifying sources of requirements, as well as identifying the methods to draw out requirements from these sources. This course will cover techniques for eliciting requirements from your stakeholders.

Understanding Elicitation Process
Requirements elicitation is not an isolated compartmentalized activity. Typically as more knowledge is acquired and analyzed, more questions will be revealed. Utilizing a standardized elicitation process and variety of techniques will help the business analyst approach this iterative process in a structured manner. Stakeholder expectations are managed through a natural decomposition revealing requirements incrementally.

This course will provide a standardized process that will be customized through the use of a variety of elicitation techniques.

Why is Elicitation so Difficult?
There are many factors that contribute to the high degree of difficulty we experience when drawing forth/bringing out information from stakeholders. Just to name a few:

• Unclear problem statement
• Political landscape
• Inadequate discovery time
• Reconciliation of conflicting information
• Project/Products are not aligned with organization's goals
• Large number of highly interrelated requirements
• No clear decision maker

To overcome these difficulties we must encourage cooperation and communication.

10 Immediate benefits of this course

• Determine the most effective elicitation technique based on the situation you face
• Learn to receive information effectively
• Understand the pros and cons for a variety elicitation techniques
• Appreciate the challenges of stakeholders providing the information
• Walk away with templates for performing elicitation
• You will have requirements elicitation techniques to incorporate in your day-to-day work life
• Recognize stakeholder non-verbal cues and flex your approach appropriately
• Understand the impact of trust on requirements elicitation
• Ways to build trust quickly
• Minimize the risk of missing requirements

Who Should Attend Business Analysis Elicitation Training

This course is valuable for anyone who needs to understand stakeholders' needs.
Perfect for:

• Business Analysts
• Developers
• Data Modelers
• Process Modelers
• Project Managers
• Business Architects
• Testers
   

Prerequisites

n/a

Course Outline:

I. Overview of Requirements Elicitation - This course is intended to provide guidance to business analysts when preparing, conducting, documenting and confirming elicitation activities. This course takes a deep dive into the elicitation tasks involved when utilizing generally accepted elicitation techniques. This section provides for a lively kick-off of conversations to:

1. Define requirements elicitation
2. Discuss why is elicitation difficult
3. Understand the impact of trust on requirements elicitation
4. Introduce the nine elicitation techniques
5. Introduce a fictitious but realistic case study to gain hands on practice with the elicitation techniques

II. Performed Elicitation Techniques - We think of this as "doing our homework" to ask the right questions of the right stakeholders and build our creditability with stakeholders. There are two generally accepted techniques for eliciting information from existing non-human sources. In this section, the participants will utilize these techniques to start to build requirements and questions to be verified by stakeholders.

1. Group exercise to analyze an "As-Is" Context Diagram and create "To-Be" Context Diagram
2. Group exercise to analyze documentation to build questions

III. Distributed Elicitation Technique –Many times we need a means of eliciting information from many people, sometimes anonymously, in a relatively short period of time. A survey can collect information about customers, products, work practices and attitudes. We will learn about how to effectively write questions in a context-free and non-biased fashion.

1. Group exercise to build and distribute a survey
2. Group exercise to analyze survey results and presentation of survey results

IV. Event Based Elicitation Techniques – We need lots of tools as we engage individuals for requirements elicitation. We will explore six event based techniques focusing on the pros and cons of each technique and when use which technique.

1. Group exercise to conduct Brainstorming role play
2. Group exercise to create Focus Group discussion map
3. Group exercises for Interviewing Technique
   • Discuss the types of questions
   • Question Preparation incorporating best practices
   • Facilitate Interview Role Play – one on one and group interviews
4. Review Observation Technique
5. Review Prototype Technique
6. Group exercise to conduct a Requirements Workshop

V. Elicitation Planning

1. Facilitate the elicitation plan discussion
2. Group exercise to plan elicitation activities for some fictitious examples