Elicitation is a process of working with stakeholders to understand what they want to achieve through the project or to understand how the business is organised today.Elicitation involves bringing out the best ideas from people who see all the different aspects of the problem and includes documenting the result of what you find.
To avoid the possibility of fatal mistakes hampering a project, adequate research and preparation are hence necessary for the elicitation process.There are different process for collecting the information from stakeholder. Those are called requirement elicitation techniques.
Most popular elicitation techniques are:
Brainstorming: Brainstorming consider as a one of the important elicitation technique because user can come up with innovative ideas or requirements. These ideas can be reviewed and relevant one can be added in the system requirement.Suggestions coming out of the brainstorming sessions should be properly documented in order to draft the plan of action.
Document Analysis: It is an act of cross checking the requirements to the other sources. Example of document analysis sources from project plan,System specification,process documentation,customer feedback,minutes of meetings and user manuals.This technique is used to identify the gap in the system.It will also useful for migration of projects. Hence we are bringing something into the competitative to the market.Without breaking any non isclosive clauses or copy right laws,review everything that you can get on your hands from competitors and other industries that has similar systems.
Prototyping: Prototyping helps to generate early feedback,and boost stakeholders participation in requirement elicitation technique.Giving visiual representation of demo given tot he client by creating prototype, so that client get an idea of how the priduct looks like.Prototype can be a tool to genearate a feedback/conversations.This can be advantage for the business analyst and stakeholders since this allows them to identify gaps/problems early on.
Interviews: An interview is a systamatic approach to elicit information from a person or group of people. In this case, the business analyst act as an interviwer. An interview provides an opportunity to explore and/or clarify the requirements in more detail. Interview involve asking questions,Listerning to answers and asking follow up questions.
Workshops : For complex projects and invoving multiple stakeholders, workshops are the one of the most resource efficient method to elicit the requirements.It is highly productive focused event attended by carefully selected stakeholders and subject matter experts for a short and intensive periord.
Survey/Questionnaries: For survey/qiestionnaire,a set of questions given to the stakeholders to quantify their thoughts.After collecting the response from the stakeholder , data is analysed to identify the area of the interest of the stakeholders. The design of the questionnaire is very important,since it can influence the answers that people provide.Also the question used, as with the interview method,can be open ended or closed,depending upon the level of detail sought.