Business Analysis Soft Skills: Conversations and Workshops

How Can You Effectively Communicate with Your Stakeholders?

A lot of initial uncertainty at the beginning of an IT project comes from not knowing how to approach stakeholders to get their requirements. Should you interview each stakeholder individually or in groups? Whom should you interview first? What can you do to guide stakeholders to give you the information you need to formulate the right requirements?

Unfortunately getting other stakeholders to express their needs and wants vis-à-vis a proposed IT solution is a non-trivial challenge. On top of that, you might be dealing with cross-functional needs which complicates the task even more.

To meet that challenge, we propose that you need to hone your interpersonal skills, in particular your interviewing skills. If you have never interviewed another person before, this task alone can be intimidating.

Why Should You Take This Course?

Since interviewing other people for requirements is not an intuitive skill, this course presents a wide range of techniques for planning, preparing, and performing requirements elicitation interviews and workshops as well as polishing and publishing the results. It defines the characteristics of a good requirements interviewer to help you recognize areas for personal growth.

To guide you through the intricacies of conducting group interviews, it includes expert advice on facilitating effective Requirements Workshops (ie. JAD, RDW, User Story Workshops, Requirements Gathering Workshops, etc.), a powerful requirements elicitation technique for managing cross-functional group meetings on traditional and Agile software development methodologies.