Price: $1,999.00

Length: 2 Days
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Eliciting Stakeholder Requirements Training

Eliciting stakeholder requirements is important because clear requirements form a crucial part of project scope, and stakeholders are key players in a project’s life cycle.

Most organizations prefer to turn over the crucial task of eliciting stakeholder requirements to a business analyst. By forming a shared vision of a project, a business analyst saves many hours during development.

Preparation starts with business analysts collecting the documentation they need and analyzing the current system (if one exists). Documentation usually includes:

  • A description of the organization: business rules, structure, legal and regulatory requirements
  • Details of the project: solution analysis results, reports, or requirements prepared by other business analysts, technical and end-user documentation of the existing system, manuals, instructions, tutorials for users and employees
  • Marketing materials: market research, competitor analysis, materials used to promote the solution

In eliciting stakeholder requirements, business analysts need to determine which requirement elicitation techniques will provide the best results given the project at hand and appropriate stakeholders.

Requirements gathering can provide insight on relevant stakeholders. It is important to identify the right people up front so everyone can begin on the same page. Doing so eliminates the need to fill in missing requirements later that could potentially change the course of the project.

There are a variety of methods for eliciting stakeholder requirements. One popular method is the use of focus groups, which help stakeholders be more forthcoming and articulate solutions. This approach helps organizations get a lot of information at once.

Surveys can also be useful for eliciting stakeholder requirements. Choose participants wisely based on desired criteria. Create clear questions that do not lead the respondents. Questions can have a number of finite choices or be open-ended—for best results consider the goal of the question, as well as the number of respondents, to determine the best structure for proper analysis.

As is often the case, a variety of requirements elicitation methods can be employed to unearth the business needs of a project. For example, a business analyst may ask specific requirements questions in a focus group, in a brainstorming session, or during observation.

Effective requirements elicitation is an area that is critical to the success of projects. Ironically, it is a process often overlooked by many analysts. This oversight can be costly to the project in terms of time and budget but, more importantly, could lead to incomplete requirements or, even worse, a failed project.

A Standish Group report lists “incomplete requirements” as the leading cause of software project failure and reveals that poor requirements account for 50% of project failures. Poor requirements are a result of sub-standard elicitation which may also lead to scope creep, budget overrun and inadequate process redesign.

Elicitation is important as many stakeholders are unable to accurately articulate the business problem. Therefore, analysts performing the elicitation need to ensure that the requirements produced are clearly understandable, useful and relevant. A well-defined problem and clear requirements will go a long way to creating the correct solution that adds value to the business.

Eliciting Stakeholder Requirements Training Course Specifics

Eliciting Stakeholder Requirements training course provides the key concepts of stakeholder requirements elicitation. It introduces various tools and methods of collecting information and requirements from project’s stakeholders. Participants also learn about the common challenges, disadvantages and concerns associated with each method and technique.

Target Audience

  • Project managers
  • Project engineers
  • Business analyst
  • All individuals who are involved in the processes of collecting data and eliciting requirements in various projects

Training Objectives

Upon the completion of eliciting, collecting and developing requirements workshop, the attendees can:

  • Identify relevant stakeholders and other sources of information for each high-level requirement
  • Plan to elicit accurate requirements and classify them
  • Create a framework to identify stakeholder needs and requirements
  • Choose appropriate tools for requirements collection and determine the rationale for their selection
  • Elicit thorough, accurate, and traceable requirements by applying different tools
  • Conduct interviews with stakeholders to analyze and validate their needs
  • Learn about various communication skills to interact with stakeholders
  • Gather a complete set of requirements based on the business needs and stakeholder goals in order to meet project objectives
  • Conduct requirement workshops to assist hard data collection and documentation of the requirements
  • Define the capability scope
  • Apply best practices of data elicitation

Course Outline

Overview of Eliciting, Collecting and Developing Requirements

  • Eliciting requirements definition
  • Basics of eliciting requirements
  • Definition of requirements
  • Issues of elicitation
  • Gathering and documenting requirements
  • Agile requirements development
  • Eliciting methods and techniques

Requirements Elicitation Problems

  • Problems of scope
  • Problems of understanding
  • Problems of volatility

Elicitation Techniques

  • Information gathering
  • Requirements expression and analysis
  • Verification and validation

Elicitation Methodology Frameworks

  • Requirements elicitation process model
  • Methodology
  • Integration of techniques
    • Fact-finding
    • Requirements gathering
    • Analysis and rationalization
    • Prioritization
    • Integration and validation
  • Criteria assessment

Eliciting Tools

  • Hard data gathering
  • Interviews
  • Questionnaire
  • Group techniques
  • Participant observation
  • Ethnomethodology
  • Knowledge elicitation techniques

Traditional Elicitation Approaches

  • Introspection
  • Reading existing documents
  • Analyzing hard data
  • Interviews
  • Surveys / Questionnaires
  • Meetings

Hard Data Collection

  • What is considered as hard data?
  • Sampling methods
    • Purposive sampling
    • Random sampling
    • Stratified random sampling
    • Clustered random sampling
  • Size of sampling
  • Sampling process

Interviews

  • Types of interview
    • Structured
    • Open-ended
  • Advantages
    • Rich collection of data
    • Good for uncovering opinions, feelings, goals, as well as hard facts
    • Can probe in-depth, & adapt follow up questions to what the person tells you
  • Drawbacks
    • Hard to analyze a great amount of qualitative data
    • Hard to compare various respondents
    • Interviewing is a challenging skill
  • Concerns
    • Unanswerable questions
    • Implicit information
    • Removal from context
    • Interviewer’s attitude may cause bias
  • Some useful tips
    • Starting off tips
    • Obtain permission to record the interview
    • Ask the straightforward questions first
    • Follow up interesting leads
    • Leave open-ended questions for the end

Questionnaires

  • Advantages
    • Can quickly gather info from large numbers of people
    • Can be managed remotely
    • Can gather manners, beliefs, characteristics
  • Disadvantages
    • Simplistic categories generate so little material
    • No chance for users to take their real needs
  • Concerns
    • Bias in sample selection
    • Bias in self-selecting respondents
    • No statistical significance
    • Open-ended questions are difficult to analyze
    • Leading questions
    • Appropriation
    • Vague questions

Group Elicitation Approaches

  • Categories
    • Focus Groups
    • Brainstorming
  • Advantages
    • Better communication than formal interview
    • Can gauge reaction to stimulus materials
  • Disadvantages
    • Can create unnatural groups
    • Danger of Groupthink
    • May only provide superficial responses to technical questions
    • Requires a highly trained facilitator
  • Concerns
    • Sample bias
    • Dominance and submission

Joint/Rapid Application Development Principals

  • Group dynamics
  • Visual aids
  • Organized, rational process
  • WYSIWYG documentation method

Participant Observation Technique

  • Approach applications
  • Advantages
    • Contextualized;
    • Reveals details that other methods cannot
  • Disadvantages
    • Extremely time consuming
    • Resulting ‘rich picture’ is hard to analyze
    • Cannot say much about the results of proposed changes

Elicitation Models

  • Waterfall model
  • Spiral model
  • Agile model
  • Using multiple models

Elicitation Best Practices

  • Use your interpersonal skills
  • Always think broadly
  • Be prepared
  • Determine and manage stakeholders
  • Identify the root cause of the problem
  • Define the capability scope
  • Extract and elicit requirements from all the available sources
  • Categorize the type of documents and requirements
  • Model the requirements for validation
  • Rank the requirements based on their importance
  • Obtain final agreement from contributing stakeholders
  • Document the requirements for final approval

Eliciting, Collecting and Developing Requirements Workshop

  • Stakeholder requirements play major roles in systems acquisition
  • Stakeholder Needs and Requirements activities
  • To elicit a set of clear and concise needs
  • Process Approach
  • Activities of the Process
  • Artifacts, Methods and Modeling Techniques
  • Practical Considerations

 

Eliciting Stakeholder Requirements Training

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