Requirements Elicitation (BA26)

What you will learn

Strong elicitation skills are a 'must have' for anyone charged with defining requirements for their project. Success is dependent on a mixture of technical skills (i.e. knowing which technique to use and how to use it) and interpersonal skills (i.e. building relationships, listening, and gaining consensus). Whether you plan to meet with your stakeholders in one-on-one sessions, in a requirements workshop, or remotely, you will need to know how to select and implement techniques to accurately and efficiently identify the needs of your business.

Upon Completion:

By taking this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Apply best practices to resolve common problems encountered in requirements elicitation
• Establish and communicate the scope for eliciting requirements on a project
• Identify, analyze and manage stakeholders during the elicitation process
• Determine the appropriate mix of elicitation techniques to utilize on a project
• Plan and conduct an interview to elicit requirements
• Plan and conduct several different forms of requirements elicitation

Prerequisites

General knowledge of the requirements process is recommended. The Business Analysis Essentials (BA-01) course would provide this information.

Course contents

Day 1

Unit 1: Introduction

• Objectives
• Course Goals
• Business Analysis Resources
• BABOK® Guide Components
• Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide
• Areas of Knowledge Compared
• BABOK® Guide Knowledge Areas
• BA Elicitation Tasks, Techniques, and Outputs
• Business Analysis Competencies

Unit 2: Fundamentals of Requirements Elicitation

• Challenges with requirements elicitation and requirements
• Best practices to overcome elicitation and requirement challenges
• Common elicitation techniques
• Requirement types

Unit 3: Understanding the Objectives and Product Scope

• Strategy Analysis; the start to defining the business need
• The importance of documenting business objectives and product scope before elicitation
• Context diagramming to define product scope

Unit 4: Identifying and Analyzing Stakeholders

• The importance of stakeholder analysis and management
• Factors to consider when determining which elicitation techniques to utilize

Unit 5: Interviews, Focus Groups, & Surveys

• The interviewing technique and when best used
• Benefits and weaknesses of interviews
• Questions types
• Conducting a good interview
• Benefits and weaknesses of Focus Groups and Surveys
• Best practice tips for focus groups and surveys

Day 2

Unit 6: Brainstorming and Workshops

• The benefits and weaknesses of workshops
• Types of workshops
• Facilitate a workshop
• Decision rules
• Practicing facilitation skills
• Benefits and weaknesses of brainstorming

Unit 7: Process Modeling using Activity Diagrams

• Purose and benefits of process modeling
• Using process modeling to elicit
• The UML^® equivalent – Activity Diagrams
• Observation as an elicitation technique

Unit 8: Prototyping

• Benefits and weaknesses of prototyping
• Key prototyping terms
• Three forms of prototyping; storyboard, wireframes, and HTML (functional prototypes)

Unit 9: Document Analysis, Reverse Engineering, and Interface Analysis

• The role of document analysis in requirements elicitation
• Benefits and weaknesses of document analysis
• Reverse engineering to uncover unknown information about an existing solution
• The value of Interface Analysis

Unit 10: Course Wrap-up

• What will you take away?
• How to obtain additional information