February Chapter Event

Improving Elicitation Techniques to Increase the Probative Value of Elicitation Sessions 

Guest Speaker: Susan Schanta, Director Program & Quality Consulting, Cognizant Technology Solutions

Driving the elicitation session can be difficult when the business doesn’t know “what information is important” or “how to deliver requirements” in terms that can be translated into actionable requirements.  The burden is left to the Business Analyst to draw the information out of the business in a manner that can be translated into clear, concise and measurable requirements.  In this session, Susan will share tips and techniques to enhance elicitation session preparation to help remove ambiguity from requirements gathering and documentation.

• Conditioning the business to come prepared for Elicitation Sessions
• Building Elicitation Checklists to support asking probative questions to drive to actionable business and user requirements.
  • Using clarification trackers to draw ambiguity patterns to enhance Elicitation Checklists
  • Collaborating with Development & QA to better understand the type of elicitation questions to ask in upcoming Elicitation Sessions
• Sensitizing the BA Team to the use of language and how to recognize ambiguous terms
• Measuring success with metrics
  • Defects attributed to missing, incomplete or unclear requirements
  • Rate of change requests and redo work
  • Maintenance as a percentage of the IT budget