Elicitation & Collaboration and their need for BA

Elicitation is like extracting the information from a source or person. Here, This Elicitation plays a vital role in gathering the requirements. And this process will be going to proceed by the Business Analyst. Business Analyst (BA) is a person who acts a bridge between the client and the technical team. Like Business Analyst gathers the requirements from the clients like stakeholders and users and provides a detailed clarification to the technical team about requirements. A Requirement is basically a need of the client. Those needs of client can be gathered and finds solution. Requirements were categorized into different types i.e. 1) Business Requirements – Specific needs or conditions that a business must meet to achieve its objectives, 2) Stakeholder Requirements – it defines the needs of a particular client or stakeholder, 3) Solution Requirements – It describes the solution characteristics like a) Functional – It defines what system or service should do, b) Non-Functional – It describes how the system or service should perform, etc. Business Analyst follows Elicitation Technique to gather these types of requirements. Requirement Elicitation is the process of gathering business requirements from the stakeholders or business users. A commonly used framework is BDRFOWJIPQU, which covers the major elicitation techniques, 1) Brainstorming – It is used to generate many ideas and possible solutions, it can be done in groups or individually to generate new ideas or solutions. 2) Document Analysis – It is done through reading a previous existing document like BRD, Business reports, etc. and understands the product or service, 3) Reverse Engineering – It is used when we need to understand an existing system or application by studying its code, database and documentation, especially when the original requirements or the design documents are not available. It consists of 2 categories like Black box and white box reverse engineering, 4) Focus Groups – It is used to collect opinions, gathers feedback from the selected group of users, 5) Observation – Observing the work of others as a part of gathering the requirements. It is commonly used in research and requirements gathering to gather the data directly by observing people’s work, processes or systems. 6)Workshop – It can comprise people into groups or more users or stakeholders working together to identify he requirements 7) JAD Sessions – JAD stands for Joint Application Development, it is used to gather requirements collaboratively and makes decisions. 8) Interview – It is a systematic approach to elicit information from a person or a group of people. It can be conducted in various contexts such as during requirement gathering, stakeholder analysis or process analysis. There are 2 main approaches to conduct interviews they are Structured and Unstructured Interviews. 9) Prototyping – It defines the layout of application or product and their interactions of features with the user. 10) Questionnaire – we use this technique, when the large number of users need to be contacted and when we need to collect standardized Information from many people and when we need to collect feedbacks or opinions about an existing system. And mostly when there is no time and budget for conducting Individual interviews. 11) Use case specifications – It is used to define the interactions between the user and the use cases. Collaboration is like co-ordination or interaction between the Business Analyst (BA) and the stakeholders to define the requirements, validate the requirements, Prioritize the requirements and agree on those requirements. As a BA, they have the responsibility to manage the stakeholder collaboration. This is about encouraging the stakeholders to collaborate. Elicitation and Collaboration plays major role in Business Analysis work. It provide clear and structured way for solutions for business problems.