How to Prepare and Facilitate Requirements Workshops

Gathering business requirements from subject matter experts is the single most important activity in any project. If the requirements aren’t right, the project will not succeed. Unfortunately, this is also one of the most challenging activities of the entire project. Getting the right stakeholders together can be difficult to impossible. The process is filled with uncertainty, both from a methods perspective as well as a business needs perspective.

Knowing what to ask, how to ask it and how to help the business subject matter experts discover their requirements are all critical skills for the business analyst role. Knowing how to plan, prepare and facilitate effective requirements gathering sessions are one of the most critical business systems analysis skills.

This workshop is a subset of the class 1-10 How to Gather and Define Business Requirements

Use a methodology to prepare an requirements gathering workshop
Adapt a check-list of pre-meeting activities
Organize and schedule a business requirements gathering workshop
Use standard requirements gathering questionnaires to structure the meeting
Prepare the participants for the workshop using effective email communication methods
Use open issue, question, and post-session task lists to maintain momentum in the meeting
Generate and sustain a productive workshop environment
Develop contingency plans for dealing with unpleasant situations
Evaluate a workshop to improve the process
Organize and analyze the visible results of the workshop
Defend the need for maintaining contact with all participants after the workshop