Facilitating a Requirements Workshop
Course Length: 2 days
DESCRIPTION
The art of bringing people together, face-to-face or remotely, to elicit requirements, make decisions, and gain consensus on solutions is a critical success factor for teams. This course offers facilitation skills training that can be used for structured requirement workshops and facilitating a small informal group to a decision. This course goes beyond traditional facilitation training by focusing on requirements workshop techniques specific to gaining a shared understanding of requirements in person or with remote participants. Five job aids are provided as valuable after class resources as participants begin preparing and conducting their facilitated sessions.
TARGET AUDIENCE
This course is designed for experienced, knowledgeable business analysts involved with requirements elicitation and analysis. Students are expected to understand the purpose of business and functional requirements.
PREREQUISITES
We recommend that students first attend our Essential Skills for Business Analysis class or have experience in project scope definition, eliciting requirements from subject matter experts, and understanding how business requirements fit into the entire systems development effort.
COURSE OUTLINE
INTRODUCTION
- Define requirements facilitation
- Define participant roles
- Learn guidelines for requirements facilitators
- Explore techniques for facilitating across distance
STUDENT WORKSHOP
- Conduct a mini-requirements workshop
- Practice techniques used for requirements workshops
SESSION FEASIBILITY
- Determine when requirements workshops are appropriate:
- Review the core requirements components and discuss how they are best gathered
- Learn when not to use requirements workshops
- Student Workshop: Practice determining session need using real-world scenarios
Learn facilitation techniques:- Brainstorming
- Consensus building
- Visualizing
- Flowcharting
- Storyboarding
STUDENT WORKSHOP
- Lead a session to teach and utilize various facilitation techniques as assigned by the instructor
- Conduct individual sessions
- Observe and give feedback for each session
PLANNING AND PREPARING FOR A FACILITATED SESSION
- Plan the session
- Prepare for a session:
- Outline the goals and requirements deliverables
- Select session participants and determine if pre-session interviews are appropriate
- Student Workshop: Utilize the Session Plan Summary Template, Session Plan Template, and Session Agenda Template to plan and prepare for a facilitated session
CONDUCTING THE SESSION
- Learn the stages of group development/productivity
- Facilitate decision making – work toward consensus
- Conduct the session:
- Utilize a checklist for managing the session
- Set session rules and manage the session
- Encourage participation
- Manage group focus
- Learn reactive techniques to use during the session
- Create a follow-up action plan
- Follow up on the session:
- Produce the final requirements document
- Share session feedback
- Determine the next steps to finalize the requirements
STUDENT WORKSHOP
- Conduct a requirements workshop using the plans developed in the prior student workshop (May include remote participants if desired)
- Produce a requirements deliverable using one or more of the facilitation techniques learned in class
- Personal feedback will be provided to drive skill development
COURSE SUMMARY
- Bringing it all together
- Develop an Action Planwith next steps on the student’s current project