Introduction & Guidance To Elicitation And Collaboration

Conducting elicitation involves the work business analyst performs to better understand organisational needs and identifying solutions for those needs that will satisfy the stakeholders. While conducting elicitation, the BA explores and collects all of the vital information by interacting with stakeholders, experimenting, and doing research.

The three most common types of elicitation are collaborative elicitation, research, and experiments. Stakeholders’ participation and collaboration are crucial and they take part by providing information and interacting during elicitation and studying, researching, and offering feedback.

An elicitation activity plan is the main input for conducting elicitation. It provides details on elicitation activities and techniques, sources of information, and logistics and scope of the activity. The unconfirmed elicitation results are the expected output, containing information captured in the activity-specific format.

Conducting elicitation has two key elements:

• Guiding Elicitation Activity
• Capturing Elicitation Outcomes

Guidelines and tools that are used as the BAs conduct elicitation are business analysis approach, existing business analysis information, stakeholder engagement approach, and supporting materials. The most widely used techniques for conducting elicitation are:

• Benchmarking and Market
• Analysis
• Brainstorming
• Business Rules Analysis
• Collaborative Games
• Concept Modelling
• Data Mining
• Data modeling
• Document Analysis
• Focus Groups
• Interface Analysis
• Interviews
• Mind Mapping
• Observation
• Process Analysis
• Process Modelling
• Prototyping
• Survey or Questionnaire
• Workshops

The key stakeholders in this phase of the business analysis process are customer, domain subject matter expert, end-user, implementation subject matter expert, sponsor, and any other stakeholders with relevant knowledge.