How can you elicit requirements more effectively in business analysis?

Understand the context. Context encompasses not only stakeholders but also processes, regulations, and other documents that can serve as the basis for requirements. Recognize how interacting systems can impact your requirements. Analyze competition and their solutions. Do not assume that your stakeholders are the sole sources of information.

Start at the very beginning and have the conversation to find out whether the business understands what the problem is and then ensure you also know what the problem is. It's essential that you are clear in what the problem is as this allows your requirements to be concise but also allows healthy challenge if a requirement doesn't stack up to the problem. Being clear with the problem also dramatically reduces the chances of translation issues when liaising with development teams also. You don't want to end up as the go between and delivering a product that neither the business or development are happy with. Where possible, reduce the friction by encouraging over the table conversations and build relationships.

It’s very important to bring in empathy and understand the context when approaching any clients whether internal or external for requirements. Sometimes change is sought by the people affected, sometimes it is forced upon them as an organisational mandate. It’s important to understand that different approaches are required in dealing with each of these situations. The former requires a demonstration of expertise and building of trust by showing that you understand the subject matter well enough and come with a problem solving approach . The latter requires a completely different approach . It requires selling skills! The approach in this case is to market the change and convince people how it’ll benefit them before doing anything else!

Start with the highlevel requirement to get the overall picture for the need. Get the exact use case clear before starting the deep dive and start Breaking the requirement into pieces.

Before diving into the requirements, know the background. Who are the end users, who is communicating the requirements to you. what is project and it's objective, which developer is going to work on it. Know the entire picture of the user story.

As a Business analyst I usually take the help from the Dev leads and architects to finalise the methods and then propose accordingly. Choosing the right methods to fulfil the requirement matters a lot and it should also sync with the compatibility of our team and client budget as well.

If you Prepared 100% your Elicitation will success 100% So its most critical step in Elicitation success , preparing may include - Ground rules - Session goal - Agenda - presentation material - question to be discussed

It is not necessary that you will get all the requirements clearly in the first attempt. Take the time to reflect and analyse the requirements. Talk to the developer or have them join you in the requirements session to add inputs from their perspective. If any point needs further clarification, dont hesitate to ask for more information. Invalid requirements will result in budget and time over runs. To avoid multiple reworks, make sure you have all your doubts about the requirements cleared.

Business stakeholders will often provide a high-level requirement. It is or job as BAs to dig deeper beneath the surface and gain more understanding of what is required. Be more curious and ask more probing questions to uncover their motives. Make notes of everything that is discussed to not miss any points.

Requirements are documented as functional and non-functional specifications documents. Once you have elicited the requirements, it is time to document them. Once you have done that, you should have them verified and validated with the stakeholders. Check with the developers for the feasibility and obtain sign offs before proceeding with any implementation.

The most important part in requirements elicitation is to understand the problem or why the change is needed? In addition, understanding the elecitation scope is crucial e.g. -Requirements Elecitation for creating system from scratch. -Requirements elecitation for customizing ERP system. -Requirements elecitation for integrating two systems. This will help you getting enough, accurate information and avoid waste.

I generally do NOT use functional prototypes (and hope they do not exist from the UX team). From my experience developers do NOT read requirements if a functional prototype exists. I prefer a a simple UI graphic or back of the napkin prototype with minimal functionality so that it is obvious the requirements need to be read. I've been a developer, so I get it. You want to get to coding as fast as possible. :)