Best Practices, Skills, and Attitudes for Requirements Gathering on IT Projects

Getting the right requirements from the right people at the right level of detail and the right time are the keys that unlock the potential for project success. This is true whether your project involves rearranging your garage or delivering a multi-million dollar Information Technology (IT) solution. Requirements define a proposed future so if they are not right, you will never get what you really need. Those responsible for gathering requirements for the software from subject matter experts have to elicit the requirements for the entire future business solution of which the software is just one component, albeit an integral one. Getting the right requirements from the right people at the right time for your project is one of the critical success factors for any IT project.

This 90-minute course defines the concept of eliciting requirements and explains its necessity. It defines and contrasts 5 specific types of interviews for helping subject matter experts discover their requirements. Since interviewing is not an intuitive skill, we also present a wide range of interviewing techniques and define the characteristics of a good requirements interviewer. To guide you through the intricacies of conducting group interviews, we dedicate an entire section to facilitating Requirements Gathering Workshops (JAD, RDW, User Story Workshops, etc.), a powerful requirements definition technique for cross-functional groups on traditional and Agile software development methodologies.

The class is an introduction to requirements interviews and will greatly benefit anyone wearing the business analysis hat in an organization. We use talking-head videos and “intellimated” content to present the concepts visually and vocally for increased reader comprehension and retention. There are no prerequisites for eliciting stakeholder requirements. Although presented in the context of IT projects, these requirements elicitation methods for facilitated and individual requirements interviews can be used by anyone, anytime to lead project stakeholders from the inception of an idea to the business requirements for a proposed solution