Sample Requirements Elicitation Questions - to Guide Novice Business Analysts
Massive literature is available out there on what quality requirements are, core components of a requirement, requirements elicitation techniques like brainstorming, document analysis, requirements workshops, etc. Often these are excellent articles. We can all read and understand these concepts. But the real problem for most Junior & Intermediate BAs out there is (1) What sort of questions to ask the stakeholders so as to elicit the different levels/types of requirements? (2). How to ask these questions? How to ask these questions in lame terms? How to probe further for more? How detailed should the requirements be? etc,. These questioning skills may be taken for granted but this is where everything starts, QUESTIONING, & not just questioning for the sake of Questioning. Asking good and sensible questions. We all know one needs to plan & prepare for elicitation, but still the thorny issue is how to Question. Believe it or not, this skill is presumed to be inate to a lot of BAs but clearly not the ones in my network/cycles. Some of us lie awake at night, fearing the Doom Day of Elicitation. A friend mine has developed stomach ulcers because of excessive worry. One may ask, 'where are the BA mentors and coaches?'. They are busy chasing deadlines.
Does anyone out there have a good template that entails sample elicitation questions just to get some of us started please? Any advice is more than welcome. Unfortunately a lot of BAs are thrown into the deep end with limited skills, knowledge and experience BUT they are expected to perform miracles!
Your assistance would be highly appreciated in this regard.
Questionning???
First of all, there is no need to worry about business to a degree of sickness. :-)
Yes, questioning mastership comes with experience and I haven't seen so far a checklist which might help the junior BAs.
My advice will be use common sense if you are not sure and follow the basic grammar.
1.) What do you want? --- what is the requirement?
2.) Why do you want it? ---- reason for that requirement? How important is it to the user? Do they really know what they want or is this kind of exploration for them?
3.) How does what you want will help your business? - More exploration for you to gain deeper understanding
4.) When do you want it? --- to identify priorities
5.) Who are the beneficiaries? --- to identify who is benefiting from that requirement
6.) Who are the stakeholders? --- to see who else you need to talk to or verify information
Of course, use these questions in a better form. Not everybody likes to be asked "why?". You could use phrases like "Out of curiosity" or "to my benefit as well" "do you mind" and so on.
Be mindful that, people providing requirements are not usually focused. They talk about at different information levels. While talking about the commercials benefits, they might take a dive to putting link on a webpage suddenly. You could use an audio recorder for long interviews to listen later on.
You can either listen to everything they say and organise the information later or filter out the unnecessary information for you and just focus on what you need to get out of that requirements talk.
If it is a very broad talk then the best practical approach is to listen to everything and organise the information in a logical way so that you can go back to present it, have it reviewed and ask further questions on missing areas.
Hope this brief text helps. Contact me if you need further support.