Requirements elicitation is a core business analyst competency to ensure that organizations focus on solving the right problems and finding the best possible solutions.
One of the most frustrating challenges on a project is when the developers build a solution that everyone thought the business signed off on only to have significant changes surface during testing or even after […]
How to Get Meaningful Sign-Off on Requirements
Are you working with new stakeholders in a new company or project? As a business analyst, building rapport with critical stakeholders is one of the best ways to get a new project started effectively and
How to Build Rapport with Critical Stakeholders
Stakeholder engagement is critical to success as a business analyst. Yet, often BAs will face challenges getting stakeholders engaged on their projects. They don’t show up to meetings or don’t provide the input you need
10 Tips to Engage Stakeholders
Elicitation is the process of discovering the requirements. In particular, elicitation often refers to engaging with stakeholders to understand their needs and expectations when it comes to the scope and detailed requirements of the project.
The Top 5 Elicitation Techniques Used By Business Analysts
Stakeholder engagement is incredibly important to successful business analysis. Without engaged stakeholders who care about the project and understand the work you do as a business analyst, you will work harder to discover the right
How to Build Engagement with Stakeholders
Are you looking for a simple way to get more out of your requirements elicitation sessions? Would you like to make better use of yours and your stakeholder’s time? Would you be interested in learning
What Questions Do I Ask During Requirements Elicitation?
We’re going to the dark side of business analysis and agile requirements today, and looking at how we really help out end users who still have a waterfall mindset get clear about their requirements. This
Getting Clear Requirements in Agile from Waterfall Stakeholders
There are 2 primary reasons that business analysts miss requirements and I cover them in this video. Want to learn more? Watch this short video! And then register here for the free 3-part video training.
How to Avoid Missing Software Requirements
There are many reasons that BAs end up producing incomplete requirements, and this can have an extremely negative impact on our job performance. Today we’re taking a question from one Bridging the Gap community member,
How to Avoid Incomplete Business Requirements
Here’s a scenario you might face as a business analyst. The head of the customer service team, we’ll call her Joy, has submitted a project proposal to get a new field added to the contract
How to Resolve Feature Battles
Author: Adriana Beal Some time ago, I received a call from an IT manager from a large NY-based company. This manager (let’s call him John) wanted my help in Phase 2 of a project whose
Missed requirements: how to avoid this BA nightmare
Today we’re wrapping up our series going into a little more detail on the things I would have liked to have known before I started my business analyst career with an article about how to
Quick tips for managing requirements issues
One of the things that I wish I’d known when I started out as a business analyst was I would need to take deliberate steps to ensure my stakeholders truly got what they wanted and
4 steps to finalize a requirements document
If you’ve ever been told that you aren’t pushy enough to be a business analyst, you are going to want to read today’s article. Pushy isn’t easy, and it isn’t in our DNA as business
How to get the information you need from your stakeholders
Today let’s talk about email, specifically emailing to discover information related to requirements questions. You as the business analyst sit down and write a carefully crafted email with a very thoughtful question and send it
When to Use Email to Answer Requirements Questions
In a new business analyst position, it can be a challenge to figure out how to learn everything you need to know to be successful. Knowledge about the business and industry can be acquired over
How to Learn About a New Business Domain
Are you wondering what concrete steps you can take to make sure you don’t overlook requirements on your next project? In business analysis, the set of techniques used to discover the requirements is called elicitation. For the most
53 Tips For Discovering All the Requirements
Imagine the scene: A significant project is underway, and you are leading the detailed analysis. You create your business analysis work-plan, and decide to start the initial requirements elicitation by meeting and interviewing a few
3 Elicitation Techniques You Can Do Without Stakeholder Access
We put a lot of burden on ourselves as business analysts to get as much information as possible as early as possible in the process. The questions we think to ask are critical to getting
7 Questions That Will Get Even More Information Out of Your Stakeholders
Do you find yourself thinking up questions after a requirements meeting that you wish you would have thought to ask? Are your stakeholders frustrated because you come back again and again with more questions? Would
8 Ways to Be Less Irritating and Minimize Follow-Up Questions After Requirements Meetings
A well facilitated workshop can be an extremely good opportunity to bring stakeholders together, brainstorm and discuss potential ideas and requirements. Great workshops are often creative, high-energy and fun. They should provide stakeholders with equal
Help Your Stakeholders Leave Their Rank at the Door: 6 Workshop Levelers
Picture yourself leading a requirements meeting early in the project. You show up 5 minutes early, get yourself settled, spread out your notes, and fire up your laptop. You review your agenda so it’s top
How to Keep Your Elicitation Session From Going Off Track
Do you ever feel like your stakeholders keep repeating themselves? Would you like certain aspects of the elicitation process to go a little faster? In this post, we’ll look at why even when we’re listening
How to Get Your Stakeholders to Stop Repeating Themselves
Elicitation can be a tricky activity. Often when needing to understand the requirements for a particular project, the temptation is to jump straight into facilitating a requirements workshop or holding stakeholder interviews. The challenge, of
The Forgotten Art of Document Analysis: 8 Documents That Can Help You Ask All the Right Questions
Do you refer to some of your business analysis activity as “requirements gathering”? Are you looking at BA jobs and seeing “requirements gathering” responsibilities and wondering what that looks like? And how do you reconcile
Requirements Gathering vs. Elicitation
OK – I admit it. One of my favourite parts of the BA role is facilitating workshops. I love being able to coax ideas out of people’s unconscious mind and I love the co-operation, creativity
How to Avoid 7 Common Workshop Pitfalls
A reader asks: I am awaiting feedback from a client on a Requirements document. It has been 3 weeks and I haven’t gotten any response. I have already sent an email reminding them. How do I
How Do I Get Feedback on a Requirements Document Without Sounding Too Demanding?
While we’ve already talked about the importance of Preparing for Elicitation and Conducting Elicitation Activities, it’s not enough to stop there. The next two (and IMHO, critical) tasks in the Elicitation Knowledge area are Document Elicitation
Let Your Stakeholders Know You Heard Them (BABOK 3.3, 3.4)
It’s difficult to even think about being a business analyst without elicitation. Yet, it’s so core, it’s often difficult to abstract from the other BA tasks as well. It seems we are almost always eliciting
3 Steps to Preparing for an Elicitation Session
We have two readers ask similar questions of our Help A BA! staff concerning extracting business rules from legacy systems; so let’s help them both out. Reader 1: As rules are mostly hardcoded and code
How Do I Extract Business Rules from Legacy Systems?
This journey has had its ups and downs. Like any new venture, it started with buoyancy – or maybe better, that feeling you get when you are heading up the first big hill of a
Laura’s CBAP Journey: Settling into a Study Rhythm (Weeks 6/7)
One often-overlooked aspect to avoiding missing requirements is stakeholder analysis. Stakeholder analysis ensures you have the right people involved in the requirements process. Often, requirements are missed simply because stakeholders are missed – and so
Investing Some Time in Stakeholder Analysis
When beginning work on a project – whether joining an existing effort or helping to plan the kick-off – the competent BA looks around at the players to identify the Stakeholders in this initiative and
Identifying Hidden Project Stakeholders by Connecting the Relationships
At the start of many projects we are in a state of natural ignorance, as we don’t yet know what we don’t know. This is especially true when defining a problem or strategy or eliciting
8 Provocative Questions that Encourage Lateral Thinking
When I began my latest consulting job, one of my first deliverables was to assist the stakeholders with a process walk through. The purpose of the walk through was to identify gaps in the ‘to”
How to Use a Process Walk-through to Validate Requirements for a New System
Reader question: “How do people go about collecting report requirements from clients and trying their best to reduce overheads whilst still fulfilling the data needs? I know there has been a big drive recently for
How Do You Collect Requirements for a Reporting System?
In my last article on Bridging the Gap, I introduced some key concepts for planning virtual meetings: Consider the focus of the meeting or workshop; Minimize duration & maximize value; Involve everyone – create a collaborative
How to Elicit Requirements from Distributed Teams? Virtual Brainstorming!
As you begin eliciting information about the requirements, it’s very likely that you’ll discover information that’s not quite a requirement and not quite a business need either but is important information that has relevant project
How to Capture Stakeholder Concerns
Author: Adriana Beal Among the many competencies that business analysts need to develop in order to advance their careers, the ability to manage ambiguity is undoubtedly a critical one. The rapid changes that happen internally
Managing ambiguity – a key business analyst competency
The initial meetings with a stakeholder can be nerve-wracking. Oftentimes projects come to us for “analysis” with very little detail. It can feel like everyone else knows more and is better prepared. Yet we, the
How to Become More Confident in Requirements Elicitation
Oftentimes a business analyst gets involved in a project with multiple different business stakeholders with competing views. Before jumping into the analysis of the project or even defining scope, it can be helpful to pull
How to a Use a Stakeholder Request List to Facilitate Scope Definition
If customers are not receiving what they ask for in a project deliverable, what causes that? Where would everything fall apart to the point that requirements were not being carried out through implementation? Chances are
Do You Have the Key Business Stakeholders Involved in Your Project?
In many organizations, the leader of the meeting must fill multiple roles. You probably created the agenda, are guiding the discussion, and also responsible for taking the notes. Over the years I’ve developed some habits
How I Take Meeting Notes and Facilitate the Discussion Without Driving Myself Crazy
Imagine you are running a meeting, probably about software requirements for a project, and someone in the room gets squirmy. Maybe they are shuffling their papers. Maybe they are bored and checking their emails. Or
STOP! You Are Being Too Detail-Oriented!
Whether an analyst resides on the business or IT side, he or she is ALWAYS in the middle. For a Business-side analyst to be effective, there must be an understanding of how to interact with
How to Reach Across Organizational Boundaries to Create a More Successful Project
We’ve all heard that a “picture is worth a thousand words”. It’s absolutely true when it comes to building good software requirements. In the case of building a software application, even the most rudimentary prototypes
Using Wireframes or Prototypes to Elicit, Analyze, and Validate Software Requirements
As long as customers have been seeking solutions from the computing industry, there has existed a barrier between those who need a technological solution and those who provide one. That barrier has morphed from basic
When trying to uncover the functionality of an existing system or discover what a new or updated system needs to do to meet the business need, the most critical activity you will perform is interviewing
How to Interview a Subject Matter Expert
When you are discovering the current capabilities of a software system, it’s critical that you take time early on to explore the system as fully as possible. Of course, you’ll also need input from stakeholders,
How to Explore the System to Discover Requirements
You’ve been there. A question sits on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t, no you won’t, ask it. Pushing back questions that surface in your consciousness is equivalent to painting over mildew.
“The Only Stupid Question is the One You Don’t Ask”
A clear sign of a poorly identified the problem is irrational disagreement. You’ve been in these meetings: one person brings up a great idea, another shoots it down immediately, and participants voice conflicting opinions about
10 Ways to Discover What the Problem Really Is
Many times we are so excited to implement a new idea or solve a recently elevated business problem that we forget to stop for a moment and reflect on the direction we are taking. I
5 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Technology Project
I have asked this question in nearly every business analyst job interview I’ve conducted and rarely heard the answer I was looking for. The most common (and wrong) answer is “never”. Let’s just be clear
When are you “done” with requirements?
It was an eye-opening moment for me. Gordon Ellison stood up and said to a bunch of business analysts “You and I are difficult people to someone.” I had an immediate attack of self-realization when
BAs are Difficult People (And So Is Everyone Else)
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