Preparing A Workshop - Educating

The end result of the requirements determination activities should of course be a set of requirements. The representation of this set will be treated later on in this chapter. A point to address at this moment is the depth of it all. How far should one go into detail? There is, as you might have expected, no concrete answer. The criteria one should handle at all time is that a requirement is unambiguous, that all stakeholders have the identical view on what the requirement means. You must use your own judgment on this one. To be able to judge, you must know the tasks that will be changed as part of the project.

And that's where it all starts. Educating the project manager. The project manager should follow the stakeholders for a while in their daily tasks. This is the only way to get a feeling for the subjects. How urgent everything might be, take the time to do this. It will pay off in the end. It helps building a sense for the processes, for the business case, for the entire organizational context. It is important to go at the issues from these angles, the wider and broader perspective.

Most users, and other stakeholders, tend to formulate their requirements based upon their current situation. They see where they are now, and can talk about the two or three steps they want to make from their current point. This is a handicap, because it limits the possibilities. Seen from a market, business and process perspective, more opportunities could be taken. Instead of talking about "extra data fields in our customer entry screen" one should address the things one wants to do with a customer, and reason from this back to what information is needed to do it.

It sounds obvious. It is. For an information analyst this might be peanuts. But for most people it tends to be very difficult. During the actual requirements determination you need the stakeholders to be completely holistic ("Ahum, let your mind flow freely in the space that surrounds you."). So, you have to educate the stakeholders before starting the phase. Let them visit a seminar on the future of the market, let them brainstorm about how their job is an integral part of the company's process, whatever. Let them view their tasks as part of the whole.