COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
ELICITATION TECHNIQUES
- WORKSHOP
Workshops comprise a group (6-10) of users or stakeholders working together to identify requirements. A requirement workshop is a structured way to capture requirements. Workshops are used to discover, define, and prioritize requirements for the proposed system. Workshops are meant to be for a defined duration and it can be repeated in order to clarify or get more details.
Conducting Workshops is the most effective way to deliver high-quality requirements quickly. It promotes mutual understanding and strong communication between users or stakeholders and the project team.
A Requirement Workshop is a conventional process to gather requirements from the clients. A workshop can be used to one’s advantage in multiple ways such as defining a requirement, prioritizing a requirement, to understand the purpose, evaluating it, setting a target or a goal to reach closure and ways to achieve it by innovating, discovering, improvising etc.
Operative and efficient workshops are known to be the most potent ways to deliver high quality and an effective requirement in less amount of time. There are few key components which the workshops consistently rely on day in and day out to achieve this feat and that’s by building trust between teams, having mutual understanding, working together as a unit by communicating with the stakeholders and the project team to produce deliverables that would take the linear path towards the closure of the project and which would help to maintain a guide for future analysis.
There are few steps to achieve an effective workshop:
Prepare for the Requirements Workshop
- Understand the stakeholder’s need and purpose of the workshop.
- Prepare and identify critical stakeholders who should attend the workshop and define the workshop’s motive.
- Identify the processes which needs to be involved to document the output of the workshop and then move ahead with scheduling sessions.
- Gather every stuff needed in the workshop and send the materials to the attendees and ensure good productivity in the session. Conduct pre-workshop interviews with attendees.
Run the Requirements Workshop
- Share the document requirements to the attendees in the session.
- Obtain consensus on conflicting views and opinions.
- The Facilitator can signify a professional and an objective tone in the session and needs to maintain decorum by conveying the ground rules.
- The Facilitator then needs to define goals and motive and manage the meeting by keeping the attendees on track.
- Facilitate a process of decision making by having consensus and ensure the participation of all the stakeholders.
- Analyze the information provided in the session and follow up with probing questions, if any. Ask the right questions related to the subject.
Post Requirements Workshop
- Follow up on any unresolved query in the meeting and action on them.
- Document the entire information shared in the session and distribute it among the attendees.
- QUESTIONNAIRE
Questionnaires are very useful when there is a lot of information and data that needs to be gathered from a larger group of stakeholders. This enables the business team to gather requirements from stakeholders remotely. The design of the questionnaire is very important, since it can influence the answers that people provide. The types of questions are important too, so proper care is needed here.
The advantage of Questionnaires is that it can be sent to many users at a low cost. It’s advantageous and good to get input from users or stakeholders. The reply received would be good to work with and easy to analyze as it’ll be documented in a written format which would in-turn save time instead of typing the whole thing again.
