From the course: Requirements Elicitation for Business Analysts: Interviews

Solution 3: Choosing probing questions

From the course: Requirements Elicitation for Business Analysts: Interviews

Solution 3: Choosing probing questions

- [Narrator] For challenge three, you were asked to identify deep, probing questions, to get at the details regarding the automation of some work for the audit operations team. When you asked the operations manager, "What teams or areas are dependent on your team?" The operations manager answered, "Well, there are many teams that are dependent on our work. It depends on what exception occurred in the audit, and what team has the skills and resources to handle it." Here are the probing questions that I came up with. What are the most common exceptions, and how often do they occur? What rules are used to determine who the exception goes to? What steps are followed to communicate and hand off the exception? So how did you do? Did you come up with similar questions? Remember that the answers will vary. It's the essence and concepts and themes of the dialogue that are the most important. What's important about this interaction, is not to get caught up in the technical design of how things currently happen or should happen in the future, but to focus on the process, data, people and rules that are involved, regardless of the technology at this point. If we are the interviewee, getting into details of the system, we can easily miss what's really needed. For example, when you ask, "What steps are followed to communicate and hand off the exception?" And the interviewee answers, "I go into a system and send an email." You'll need to follow up with a more probing question to clarify why and what is being communicated. By asking something like, "So how do you determine who to send the email to, and what do you include in the email?" Your focus when probing is to listen actively and to dig in and then summarize in terms of who, what, when and why. Who do you send the email to? What's in the email? When is it sent? And why is it sent? Make sure to dig into these areas, rather than the screen and technology details. These probing details are where all of the MIS requirements are hidden.

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