Requirements Elicitation IN Business Analysis

Elicitation and Analysis Activity are often performed concurrently, but now we will focus on the Elicitation, First Elicitation is more than gathering or collecting requirements from stakeholders, because often they have needs, ideas or problems but they may not be able to express them clearly, so elicitation relies on the knowledge and experience to identify the appropriate approaches, techniques & models to draw out information, this activity performed iteratively to define the scope and objectives of a project. Effective elicitation helps ensure that the project meets the needs of stakeholders and delivers value to the organization.

Her are key steps for the Elicitation Activity:

1- Plan for elicitation, Develop elicitation plan by.

• What information to elicit.
• Techniques (Interview, Brainstorming, Retrospectives & lesson learned) & Models for elicitation information.
• Sequencing the elicitation activity.

2- Prepare for elicitation, prepare stakeholders for elicitation by understand upfront why they are involved, what required from them and the required resources they should prepare.

• Determine the objective.
• Determine the participants.
• Determine question for the session.

3- Conduct Elicitation activity,Engage stakeholders in structured sessions to extract information. During interviews or workshops, use open-ended questions, active listening, and probing techniques to delve deeper into their perspectives and requirements.

• Introduction.
• Body, this is where the work of elicitation done by using many techniques like (Brainstorming, Collaborative games, document analysis, facilitated workshops, focus group, interviews, observations, prototypes, Types of questions (Open end question, Closed-End Questions).
• Close, End point graceful termination of the elicitation activity.
• Follow up, where information is consolidated and confirmed with the participants.

4- Document output from elicitation activity, and reviewed with participant after modeling them in appropriate way and use the required techniques to make sure that all gathered informations are understood very well and all stakeholders are on the same page.

5- Elicitation issues and challenges may face in the elicitation activity.

• The business analyst cannot get access for the right stakeholders.
• Stakeholders do not know what they want.
• Stakeholder are having difficulty to define their requirements.
• Stakeholders are not providing sufficient details to develop the solutions.