There are many skills that are required in the process of gathering and documenting requirements that a strategist, project manager, business analysts, or consultant need to master. Actually, if you are engaged to achieve clarity on a business problem or opportunity where you need to recommend a solution then you need to master four specific skills and capabilities.
There are four key skills that I have been speaking and training other professionals on in my Gathering and Documenting Requirements for Business Solutions program for over 12 years. These include elicitation, documentation, integration and communications.
Elicitation: This is an approach, process or set of tasks used to engage stakeholders to acquire information needed to make some future recommendations. Often elicitation includes facilitation approaches such as planning and the execution of focus groups, interviews, observations, meeting management and various other forms of people engagement to derive a clear picture of the business problem and/or opportunity. There are many skills, and tools and techniques to learn in this area.
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Documentation: There is always crossover from one area to another. From my perspective this has to do with documentation generation that includes the ability to research, document and manage information. Researching includes primary and secondary research approaches of documentation review and analysis and the use of surveys and questionnaires to generate information. Documentation needs to be a clearly defined deliverable. For example, a summary of findings, requirements attribute table (RAT) or maybe a strategy map. Management of documentation is the predetermined approach to your information inventory and applying it.
Integration: This is perhaps the most challenging and time consuming part of gathering and documenting requirements. This refers to the ability to bring vast amounts of information together into a single document or multiple chapters of the same document. It depends on scope of your initiative and the amounts of information that is generated. The documentation uses a RAT or some other format that captures four levels of requirements (business, stakeholder, solution and transformation). These requirements can be categorized by stakeholders, sequence or purpose, prioritized appropriately and used to implement the solution.
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Communications: This is done throughout the gathering and documenting process. The key skill is the ability to generate, present and disseminate information for specific audiences. Communication is the key skill to develop. Focus on your facilitation and presentation abilities. Learn to engage the stakeholder community to gain consensus on the overall solutions. When presenting for decision know what questions to ask (the outcome needed), the deck size appropriate (slides), present the challenge, the solution options, the recommended solutions and answer the question ‘what’s in it for me (WIIFM)’ Learning to get to Yes becomes important.
Communication is a skill that you can learn. It's like riding a bicycle or typing. If you're willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life. Brian Tracy Click To TweetIn the world of business analysis, project management, consulting or any other profession that requirements the gathering and documenting of information to solve business problems or leverage opportunities there are a number of skills to acquire. Some of the skills to focus on include planning, researching, facilitating, evaluating, modeling, decision making, documenting and communicating. I see these skills as being part of requirements elicitation, documentation, integration and communications. Each of these skills should be mastered through a combination of training, coaching and practicing in real life situations.
Remember:
Be your business, invest in the success of others, make your journey count.
Richard
