By now you are probably ready to start meeting with stakeholders to elicit requirements. You’ve found a business sponsor, scoped your project, and learned a lot exploring the system. It’s valuable to pause and create a plan of attack before diving into your stakeholder meetings. Having a plan will keep you organized and make the most of your stakeholder’s valuable time, contributing to your credibility and the overall success of the project. Besides I’ll show you a quick and dirty way to plan this project so the activity won’t take up too much time.
Note: This is a follow-on post from “Exploring the System” and post #4 of the Current Capabilities Assessment series.
At this point, you should have a fairly good idea of what you know vs. what you don’t. You’ll want to review your list (of features, use cases, test cases, etc) with a stakeholder on the business side. This might be your business sponsor, or this might be someone your business sponsor recommends to you. This person should have enough business knowledge of the system to review your list and identify any gaps. This assures your start your planning process with a fairly complete list.
Add three columns to your list–these columns will constitute your plan:
- next action,
- subject matter experts,
- input from subject matter experts.
Now, comb through your list again, this time determining the next step for each item on the list and what you level of involvement will need from your subject matter experts. The purpose of this task is to determine how much help you need. If you can draft a detailed deliverables (use case or a few test cases) based on what you’ve learned, then that’s the next action. In the business owner column, you can indicate you’ll need them to review the draft documentation for completeness. Other possibilities are that you need questions answered before you can draft the deliverable or that you need a demo of the feature. In this case your involvement from the subject matter expert will be much greater.
Now, with either your business owner or primary business stakeholder (or both), go through the list and identify a subject matter expert for each item. Through this process, you’ve identified a subject matter expert group that can help further validate your list and fill in details. You’ll also want to meet with someone from the technical side and identify a technical SME to ask the behind-the-scenes questions. But you’ll start your elicitation with a business focus and how people actually use the system.
That’s it, really. Combined with all the details you added to this list through exploratory testing (questions, draft requirements, etc), -you know have an actionable work plan that is suitable for most projects. If you under a time crunch to deliver, you might want to add some columns for dates and do some upfront planning to ensure your stakeholders will be available when you need them. But if your date is flexible, this is all you’ll need.
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By Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg. Laura Brandenburg is an independent business analyst consultant. She is passionate about the BA profession and is committed to contributing by supporting this blog as a forum for business analysts to build on each other's experiences. View more blog posts by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg |
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