Facilitating a Requirements Workshop

Course 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 teaches facilitation techniques 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 facilitation techniques specific to gaining a shared understanding of requirements in person or with remote participants.

Students will spend 60% of class time participating in interactive, real-world business case studies and performing each key role in at least one session. Each student will have the opportunity to practice facilitating multiple requirements sessions in a “safe” environment with personalized feedback.

The workshops in this course require students to plan the requirements workshop, develop the correct questions to ask the group, and facilitate the group to a consensus on the requirements using one of the learned techniques. This course supports and expands on the techniques in the BABOK and ICAgile’s Agile Value Management track.

Learning Objectives

• Facilitate using proven techniques for eliciting detailed business, functional and non-functional requirements
• Identify when and how to use each technique
• Develop confidence and a skill set to conduct requirements workshops, whether face-to-face or with remote participants
• Actively practice learned skills and techniques
• Use a requirements planning session template
• Prepare the participants for the requirements session
• Perform each facilitation role through role playing each session
• Conduct the session to stay focused on the core requirement that was planned as a deliverable
• Select which facilitation technique to use for each core requirement being gathered
• Complete checklists for managing and conducting the session
• Facilitate a requirements workshop including remote participants (if desired)

Intended 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.