Stakeholder Workshops

The Requirements Engineer is charged with the difficult task of eliciting requirements, which necessitates excellent communication with the stakeholders, including the customer and the analysis team. One very successful way of facilitating the elicitation of the stakeholders' needs is to run a workshop with all the key stakeholders present. The Requirements Engineer's skills as a communicator, diplomat and mediator are important to create a collaborative and respectful environment conducive to the exploration of the stakeholders' needs and concerns. It is imperative that the engineer uses terminology that the stakeholders understand, and also displays an understanding of or a willingness to learn about the elements that make up the engineering domain.

There is sometimes a misconception that what will be articulated during these workshops is a set of clearly defined requirements that can be entered into the tool as Stakeholder Requirements. This is far from the reality of what happens. Stakeholders will typically articulate a wide range of ideas, including Policies, Business Rules, Data Definitions, Project Management Constraints, Functional Requirements, Business Requirements, existing system problems and even suggested solutions. Even when an external consultant is used to run these meetings, the engineer will not have time to categorize all of these statements inside the meetings. What is needed is a way for the scribe who is tasked with documenting the statements to get them into the tool without any concern for what type of information is being recorded. Having them recorded in the tool rather than scribbled in the engineer's notebook is best practice because it allows them to be displayed during the meeting and for stakeholders to see each others' comments.

Enterprise Architect has a number of facilities that can help with these workshops. One method that is very practical is to use the Mind Mapping diagram to record the stakeholders statements, which is very effective because it is a well known method and doesn't introduce any of the formality that comes with modeling languages such as SysML. This diagram shows a starter Mind Map created from a pattern that can be altered to suit the workshop need.

The Mind Mapping facility is available by switching to that Perspective or, if it is used commonly, it can be added to a user-defined Perspective Set using the My Perspectives facility.

This Perspective, like others, requires the appropriate technology to be enabled, which in this case is Mind Mapping.

As important terms are uncovered they could be entered into the Project Glossary and, even if there is not time to discuss and debate the agreed meaning, the words will act as an initial list of important entities in the domain. Alternatively, the terms could be created as Blocks in a Block Definition diagram and related to each other with connectors that describe the important relationships between the terms.

The stakeholders can also be modeled and their organizational relationships to each other can be described in a diagram. This is a useful technique that allows key stakeholders to identify themselves in the models, which creates buy-in.