By Fernando Martinez-Campos
In this post we will explore ideas for facilitating BI requirements workshops with a group of users. The main goal of requirements discovery workshops is to identify initial BI requirements with key business stakeholders. These sessions start with open ended questions which evolve into detailed requirements. As a facilitator your responsibility is to keep the process on track so business value is derived from the discussions.
The earliest preparatory steps require that you identify the audience participants, create an agenda that will spark interest and schedule the meetings. You will also need to appoint a scribe, who will record the proceedings and capture the output (the facilitator can rarely do both jobs well). I find it useful to also have an initial set of prepared examples that show the progression of an idea into actual requirements. By showing these examples early during the first meeting, you will show stakeholders what the desired outcome of requirements gathering looks like.
Some common steps in a BI requirements discovery session are:
Let’s use these steps with an example of how these facilitated meetings were conducted at our electronics manufacturer client. The main objective was improving the repair process using BI analytics. The initial session had about eight stakeholders in attendance.
Several categories were developed that had business requirements: products returned, centers where repairs took place, tests performed, and repair actions. We developed the categories into associated business functions: for example, the Test category had related tests to test results which were associated to the Repair category with repair actions. We continued chaining more questions if the repair action yielded defect trends. By looking at how these business processes were linked, we could track the progress of the workflows in the repair process.
We published the requirements of these workflow activities along with the required data that was needed. On the next session we reviewed, adjusted and agreed on the requirements. Then it was time to prioritize which requirements needed to be implemented and created a roadmap of BI projects.
The BI requirements workshop reaped the following benefits:
As the BI stakeholders gained confidence in the combined effort, follow on sessions became easier. In fact, follow on BI requirements sessions managed themselves!
In this post we will explore ideas for facilitating BI requirements workshops with a group of users. The main goal of requirements discovery workshops is to identify initial BI requirements with key business stakeholders. These sessions start with open ended questions which evolve into detailed requirements. As a facilitator your responsibility is to keep the process on track so business value is derived from the discussions.
The earliest preparatory steps require that you identify the audience participants, create an agenda that will spark interest and schedule the meetings. You will also need to appoint a scribe, who will record the proceedings and capture the output (the facilitator can rarely do both jobs well). I find it useful to also have an initial set of prepared examples that show the progression of an idea into actual requirements. By showing these examples early during the first meeting, you will show stakeholders what the desired outcome of requirements gathering looks like.
Some common steps in a BI requirements discovery session are:
- Brainstorming ideas – This is the open ended part of the discussion
- Categorizing ideas into business function – This step organizes ideas into groups
- Associating business functions - The groups are related together
- Defining business questions – Initial business questions are chained with follow on questions
- Refining detail requirements - This step translates the questions into detailed requirements
- Prioritizing requirements – Ranks the requirements in order of importance
Let’s use these steps with an example of how these facilitated meetings were conducted at our electronics manufacturer client. The main objective was improving the repair process using BI analytics. The initial session had about eight stakeholders in attendance.
Several categories were developed that had business requirements: products returned, centers where repairs took place, tests performed, and repair actions. We developed the categories into associated business functions: for example, the Test category had related tests to test results which were associated to the Repair category with repair actions. We continued chaining more questions if the repair action yielded defect trends. By looking at how these business processes were linked, we could track the progress of the workflows in the repair process.
We published the requirements of these workflow activities along with the required data that was needed. On the next session we reviewed, adjusted and agreed on the requirements. Then it was time to prioritize which requirements needed to be implemented and created a roadmap of BI projects.
The BI requirements workshop reaped the following benefits:
- Established solid alignment between the business stakeholders and BI developers
- Documented requirements of the repair process and its analytics
- Reached early stakeholder consensus of the requirements
- Provided visibility on the agreed priorities to set the right expectations
- Provided a forum to communicate feedback and potential risks
As the BI stakeholders gained confidence in the combined effort, follow on sessions became easier. In fact, follow on BI requirements sessions managed themselves!
Fernando Martinez-Campos is a senior consultant with Baseline Consulting and expert in data architecture, data interchange standards, legacy coexistence strategies, and reference architectures templates for infrastructure, applications and databases.
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