Thursday, March 19, 2009

Requirement Gathering

Requirements gathering can be challenging at times. Sometimes discussions just go of tangent. Here are a few of the things I have found helpful.

Pre-requirement Gathering - Prior to engaging users for requirement gathering sessions:

  1. Overview of the solution that they're looking at - applicable if you're pitching a solution and are gathering requirements for it. Give a good overview of what it is capable of and as much as possible, relate to generic challenges faced by most organisations.
  2. Give out an agenda, describing what the requirement gathering sessions are for, how long it will take, any preparation that might be required (current processes, forms, etc.).

Requirement Gathering Agenda - When conducting a session, I find that this is a good guideline:

  1. Introduction - Get the users to give an overview of the company (if you haven't already) and where they fit into the organisation, what their department/business unit does and what their role is within that.
  2. Current state – what their day to day activity might look like, what are the things/processes that they are/business unit is involved in. Sometimes you get some valuable information or can derive certain things, i.e. users are disciplined, quick to learn, tech savy, etc. Not everything that they're doing today is evil or bad! Somethings may require minor tweaks, others revamp/overhaul.
  3. Current problems/issues faced with the lack of process/systems - favourite time where you listen to all the challenges, be careful not to go into solution mode (both you and the user). Just document the issues and problems.
  4. Requirements - What they want in the solution. Gather both functional and non-functional requirements. Try to ensure that users can distinct between 'must haves' and 'nice to haves'. Always validate with users.
  5. Wrap it up - let them know what the next steps are. Whether it'd be a follow on workshop, deliverable document, follow up calls to validate items.

Some of the items here have been incorporated from the Microsoft BVPS engagement model.

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