You may have seen the commercial for Domino's pizza where customers sit around and talk about how bad the pizza was and what could be done to make it better.  This is a focus group where an organization is talking to group a customers trying to elicit opinions and suggestions from them.  The same concept can be used when eliciting requirements.  Remember that as a Business Analyst the people you are building a solution for are your customers.  It does not matter if they are internal employees to the organization or people who are going to be purchasing a product or service from the company.  Focus groups take place in an interactive environment where a moderator helps guide the conversation.

This week’s requirements elicitation technique is observation.  Observation or job shadowing involves looking at the actual work environment that the end user experiences every day.  This technique is used when attempting to document an existing process or when a project’s goal is to improve a process.  Observation is a great way to understand what the end user goes through in their job and can provide some instant requirements for how a process can be improved.

Last week I wrote about how to analyze existing documentation to gather requirements.  Today I am writing about how to use interviews to gather quality requirements.  Most of you have probably used interviews in the past, but I hope this blog entry can provide some additional information that you may find helpful.

Interviews can be with one person or a group of people.  It is important that if you conduct interviews in groups to make sure that one person does not dominate the conversation and that everyone gets a chance to respond.  The way that interviews differ from brainstorming, requirements workshops, or focus groups is that they are a more formal interaction.  A lot of preparation is needed before conducting interviews, but they can be a great source of information.  There are three main phases to the interview process.  

• Prepare for the interview
• Conduct the interview
• Post interview follow-up and confirmation

The Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) which is the current documented standard for Business Analysts lists the following techniques as ways to elicit requirements from stakeholders.

• Brainstorming
• Document Analysis
• Focus Groups
• Interface Analysis
• Interviews
• Observation
• Prototyping
• Requirements Workshops
• Survey/Questionnaire

In this post I am going to focus on Document Analysis and how it can be a useful step in your requirements gathering efforts.  Blog posts in the future will touch on some of the other techniques.