From the course: Requirements Elicitation for Business Analysts: Interviews

Challenge 1: Planning interviews

From the course: Requirements Elicitation for Business Analysts: Interviews

Challenge 1: Planning interviews

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- Practice makes perfect, right? Well practice goes a long way and requirements are never perfect, but we can sure improve them with great interviews. Here are some scenarios where I've laid out some sample situations and challenge you to come up with a plan for who to meet with, the purpose of the interview, and what questions to ask. The scenarios are also provided in the exercise files. When looking at what questions to ask, make sure to use the exercise file with sample questions as a reference. Here is scenario one. You have just been assigned to a new project, and met with the IT leader who is responsible for the effort. The IT leader shares with you a little bit about the project and here are some of the things she has shared. The project is to replace a legacy system with a packaged software. The packaged software for a CRM or a customer relationship management system, the business sponsor is pretty sure he knows what package he'd like to see implemented. The user groups have lots of ideas and concerns. Ideas about what they would like to have and not like to have now and concerns about losing the comfort of what they have today. The IT leader would like you to get to work on requirements, so who would you meet with first? What would your objective be in meeting with them, and what questions would you likely start out with in your plan to interview them? Great. Now you have one down and two to go. Here is the second scenario. You've been asked to help out on some enhancement requests for the customer facing website that customers use to review their medical claim's information. The original website was implemented about six months ago and has a long backlog of enhancement requests. You've been given two specific enhancements to work on by the project manager and a list of names of those whom you should talk to about what their requirements are. The PM has given you the names of the web self-service manager, and the customer service manager as well as the director of customer service. Who would you meet with first? What would your objective be in meeting with them? And what questions would you likely start out with in your plan to interview them? I hope you can work through one more and really get this interview planning down. So lastly here is scenario three. You've been asked to work on a new project for the audit operations team. This team would like to automate some of their work and needs your help in identifying what should be automated and what some possible solutions are. Who would you meet with? What would your objective be in meeting with them? And last, what questions would you likely start out with in your plan to interview them?

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