Part Two – Elicitation and Collaboration
By Retta Witter, Senior Consultant, J. Geiger Consulting, Inc.
You need requirements but how do you get them? It isn’t always easy to get accurate and agreed-upon requirements, but you can use your BA skills from the Elicitation and Collaboration (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2015, pp. 53-74) knowledge area to help.
We will cover requirements analysis and design more in week 5 of this blog but today I would like to discuss how to extract the requirements from the subject matter experts (SMEs). The main way to do this is through what BABOK calls elicitation and collaboration.
A few years ago, I was working on a project where I had to use many different techniques to get the needed information depending on the department that the SME worked in. One of the groups I was gathering requirements for was extremely busy and didn’t appear to want to make time for the project. It was a very tricky political situation to try and navigate. To get the information from this group I used the technique BABOK calls data mining, before interviewing the SME so that I had very focused and specific questions. I needed to understand as much of what I thought the process was before talking with them and clarifying what I thought their requirements were based on the data I could analyze and then correct my assumptions.
Another project I was on the SME was excited for the improvements the project was to bring to their area and love to show me how the current system worked and didn’t’ work to help better articulate their requirements.
This chapter in the BABOK really focuses on different techniques to be used for your elicitation and collaboration. Every person and situation you will encounter with the gathering of requirements can be different based on how engaged the stakeholder is to the project and having a wide variety of the techniques in your toolbox will definitely help to be successful in the requirements gathering.
Elicitation and Collaboration
Summary
This chapter in BABOK v3 covers 12% to 20% of the certification test depending on which you are looking to take. Like my previous blog, this chapter is a key knowledge area because the information determined is used throughout the project and in many other knowledge areas as inputs.
Purpose
Elicitation is an ongoing activity throughout a project and isn’t limited to any 1 phase. Using workshops, it can be a very formal and planned process or informal and unplanned process. There are 3 main types of elicitation: collaborative, research, and experimentation.
Selecting the proper elicitation technique is very much a case by case basis. It is important to understand your stakeholder, culture of the organization, and time constraints so that you can choose the most effective stakeholder approach. In a project, there can be situations or dynamics that change, team members added, or a pandemic happens in the middle of it, you will need to be flexible in your and adjust your approach for elicitation.
The main inputs for this BABOK come from Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring( blog #1, but outputs are used in future knowledge areas which are executed in a project: Strategy Analysis, (blog #4 in the series) and Requirements Analysis and Design (blog #5 in the series)
Key inputs for Elicitation and Collaboration are:
• Need
• Business Analysis Information
• Stakeholder Engagement approach (output from Business Analysis planning and Monitoring)
• Business Analysis Performance Assessment (output from Business Analysis planning and Monitoring)
Key output:
• Elicitation activity plan
• Elicitation results (unconfirmed and confirmed)
• Business Analysis information communicated
• Stakeholder engagement
Which elicitation and collaboration technique do you use the most? Find the most effective for your corporate culture?
Please stop back next week when I will be discussing Requirements Life Cycle Management.