Requirements Management & Business Process Improvement Blog

Your Two Greatest Requirements Gathering Skills

  

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Whether you are a Project Manager, Business Analyst, Technical Writer, Business Process Analyst, or Requirements Analyst, there are real skills required to manage the relationship with the stakeholders involved in software development projects. There is more to including stakeholders than gathering information for processes and requirements. I think the most important of these are:

Relationship Building

• Your ability to convince others to work together towards a common goal (agreeing on requirements or processes) is invaluable.
• You act as both a guide and specialist on the subject of requirements gathering, you engage others in the process without taking over.
• You convince others to work with you as a team, continuing to deliver and receive current, actionable feedback to support continuous growth of the project, while ensuring that the project requirements remain in-scope. (Review out-of-scope needs later).
• You are not only a problem solver but also have the ability to influence others to share in the problem solving and therefore take an active stake in the outcome.

Communication

• You actively listen to the stakeholders to understand their perspective and ensure continuous and complete understanding regardless of communication method or audience.
• You realize that the stakeholder’s terminology is different from what an IT department uses so a first step may be to make sure you understand the vocabulary the stakeholder is using. (You realize it is your job to understand them, not the other way around.)
• You know to translate for the developers and then translate for the stakeholders the information from the developers, so that the information can flow both ways. (Many times this is where the process flows will really come in handy)

These are only two of an even greater set of skills required to maintain a relationship with the stakeholders throughout the project to make the best use of the stakeholders and the requirements so that the project as a whole is a success. However, you already knew that because even though you may have not had it pointed out to you before, but part of what makes you good at this type of work is that you have these skills naturally.

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