Question
This Business Analyst Interview question is about Selecting the right Elicitation Technique in a given Scenario. The question format would be as follows:
You are contracted to develop a software system involving multiple departments of an organisation. The number of departments involved in this project is around 15. How will you go about planning the requirements elicitation, considering the project is being executed using waterfall methodology?
Question Objective: This is a scenario based question and is asked to check your understanding of various elicitation techniques and your ability to decide which one is suitable for a given situation.
Answer
In this situation, multiple departments are involved and each department will have at least one stakeholder. To elicit requirements for the entire project will require a lot of time. That’s a very time-efficient exercise. What can we do to become more efficient?
Obviously, having a 25 member team to conduct the elicitation will be an expensive exercise considering the travelling and logistics expenses.
So, what else can we do? In one of my projects, I faced a similar situation. I would like to share what we did in that particular case.
In that case, We created a small team by choosing members from the departments itself (who were IT enabled and understood processes). Each team was led by a process champion. Each department team was made responsible for interacting with other members of the team to gather requirements and document it. Of course, we conducted a small session to help them understand the formal documentation.
Once the process champions, completed their work, our team (of business analysts and process analysts ) sat with the process champions and their respective teams for knowledge transfer and review.
This technique helped us save a lot of time. The critical success factor for this approach are:
- Make sure that process champions understand software development process and the business processes
- Make sure that formal documentation format is finalised well in advance and communicated with all the teams
- The knowledge transfer and review meetings conducted at regular intervals to ensure better efficiency
So, this is the way, you can answer this question – Selecting the right Elicitation Technique in a given Scenario.
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