become your own business analyst, gather requirements for any project
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
Become Your
Own Business
Analyst, Gather
Requirements for
Any Project
Cathy Dew
Speaker Bio
Cathy Dew Consultant at Planet Technologies
Graphic Designer, Consultant and SharePoint MVP
Over 6 years of SharePoint
branding experience
Author: SharePoint 2010: Six in One
catpaint1 on Twitter
www.sharepointcat.com
Agenda
Ask the Questions
Analyze the Responses
Develop a Plan
Map Requirements to a Project
Ask the Questions
Depending on the Project Type the Questions
Differ
Avoid Technical Terms
Learn about the Business not just the problem
Adjust your questions to use the terminology of
the business
Sample of Switching Questions
Original Question:
Do you often share work documents with people
outside of your department?
Modified Question because department is not
valid in the company
Do you often share work documents with people
outside of your immediate work group?
Styles of Questions
Many ways to ask questions
Interviews
White boarding
Surveys
Game storming
Cater to Your Audience
Stakeholders
Technical
End Users
Group vs Individual
Groups are great to understand the business
and relationships
Individuals are great for details and
understanding a specific process from one
perspective
*Groups can be a challenge to do remotely
and if there is contention/disagreements
Order isn’t Important
The goal is to keep the conversation flowing
While we typically order questions by topic, its
best to encourage open conversation and go
with it.
Start Simple
Learn about the person and how they work first.
Be friendly
Don’t put them on guard
Make sure it is known you aren’t there to judge
Start out by saying it is a judgment free zone so be
honest in how you actually do things.
Personal Tips to Interviews
Watch body language
Are they guarded and you can tell they won’t
share real information
If it feels like you are pulling teeth, switch topics
and find another one to get them to talk
Its okay to tell them you don’t know if asked a
question that you really don’t know.
Tell them you will ask someone and get back to
them
Who to meet with?
It is great to meet with managers as well as
employees, but be careful to not put managers
in interviews with their staff
Starter Questions
What is the first thing you did when you got to
work today?
What kind of emails were you looking for?
Is there something you know you have to finish
before you leave today?
Top 10 Questions for
Governance
10. How Big is too Big?
Controlling the growth and size of your sites with
quotas will allow you to proactively manage the
size of your databases, ensuring that you remain
within supported size limits and that data is
recoverable in a timely manner.
9. How did that screwy file get there?
Creating a list of acceptable file types will help
you to control not only acceptable content but
also help to control site size. Also look at virus
protection and what you want on your servers
Top 10 Questions for
Governance
8. How Many is too Many?
Find out how many versions of documents people
use and need for their libraries. Decide how you
want to manage versions. Also look towards large
lists and how you will handle large item counts to
avoid non-supported lists.
7. Where Did that Go and How Do I get it Back?
Planning your Disaster Recovery and Backup
strategy is an important part of any SharePoint
implementation. Determine how long you can
wait and what content you are willing to
potentially lose to help guide you in this strategy.
Top 10 Questions for
Governance
6. When is a Site not a Site?
You should determine what decision points are
needed to create sites in your environment.
5. How Do I Make it Not Look Like That?
Determine what level of branding you would like
to use and how it should be applied. Take into
account new site creation behavior as well as site
templates.
Top 10 Questions for
Governance
4. When is it too Personal?
Then you can talk about how to manage what
properties are shown to whom and what kind of
information goes in them. – User Profiles
3. Would You Like Fries with That?
Adding customizations to your site can be tricky
from a management perspective. Whether these
are third party tools or custom development to
determine how you validate these solutions and
implement them for use.
Top 10 Questions for
Governance
2. How do I act Like the Wizard Behind the
Curtain?
Determining if you want to manage user
permission in a centralized or decentralized
structure is important and can help encourage
end user adoption
1. Can I Teach an Old User New Tricks?
The ultimate goal of any governance plan should
be to not hinder End Users actually using the
environment. Make sure you take into account
how your End Users Need to work and incorporate
that into your plan.
Analyze the Answers
This is the biggest challenge
Taking conversations and mapping them to
technical requirements
Example: I work with an excel spreadsheet that
only I need to edit, but multiple people need to
see, and they are always messing up with their
filtering.
Req: Use of Excel Services to display spreadsheet
information to multiple people, while restricting
editing to only a few.
Analyze
Best to document and start to map these
requirements in multiple types.
You will find the following types of requirements
coming out of the gathering process:
Business
Technical
Compliance
Report Issues or Concerns
Many times one of the most important things
you can capture are the items that can’t be
done by SharePoint alone
Custom Development
Not something that the product supports
Issues with lack of training for team
Validate before Planning
Once you have mapped out the requirements
based on analysis you will need to verify them
People to verify with:
Architect (your company or customer)
Developer (if needed)
Stakeholders
Why Validate?
This will help to either reinforce what is needed
or eliminate extra requirements before you
develop the plan of action
Develop a Plan
Write up the Project Proposal and show where
the requirements are covered
Somehow map them to the documents where you
analyzed… either by number, scope or some other
method
Requirement Creep
Don’t forget that requirement creep is what we
are trying to get away from, but will always
happen to some extent.
The more you gather, analyze and present the
easier it is to avoid this
But don’t get stuck in constant requirement
gathering only cycle
Thank you for
attending!
Cathy Dew, MVP
@catpaint1
www.sharepointcat.com