I am working on shortening our Requirements Elicitation and Facilitation training course to be a 4 hour course this week. I came across an L1 process flow I had forgotten I created that describes the steps in the Requirements Elicitation process.
The generic process for elicitation often starts with you not knowing anything about a topic. You then determine or are given business objectives, problems, strategies and product concepts – everything you need to bound the solution.
During planning steps, you determine who your key stakeholders are, the types of sessions you want to have, when they will be, and the information you hope to collect. You should then create the agenda for each session to help make sure all parties understand what the goals are and ensure you maximize the use of your time in an organized fashion.
The next step is to prepare models and questions to organize the session and to make it easier for stakeholders to visualize the information that you already have.
You will hold the sessions – ideally you would have a note taker depending on the size. (see the smaller flow for a few L2 process flow steps for the sessions). During the session you want all the information to be categorized in some way to limit the information your stakeholders have to process at a single time (People can only process around 7+/- 2 items at once), review the models you should have already drafted during prep, and use your existing models to derive new models.
After each elicitation session, you need to convert the notes to models and requirements that you can review with the stakeholders. And as a last step, you need to put some thought into knowing when you are done!
