In my final article on requirements development, I want to discuss the processes involves in eliciting requirements from business stakeholders. There are several commonly held techniques that are used for gathering requirements from business customers. Some of these methods are specific to software systems or systems with some type of user interface, and some are applicable to › Continue reading…
Archive for 'Brainstorming'
Tags: Brainstorming, Interviews, Prototypes, Requirements, Role playing, Storyboarding
Multi-Voting is a useful technique for helping your team rank or prioritize a list of options. It is particularly useful if the first choice or top priority is clear, but you can’t get your group to agree on the 2nd and subsequent priorities.
The basic premise is quite simple: each participant gets to cast multiple votes on a list of options. If the list is static, one not generated by the group, this can even be done before a brainstorming meeting. › Continue reading…
Attribution Analysis is a great method to use when you need to guide your team through the exercise of generating ideas. In the process, you may challenge some of the assumptions you’ve made about the nature of the problem you are trying to tackle and the realm of possible options you have for solving it. › Continue reading…
Techniques for Creative Team Thinking: Affinity Diagrams, Brain Writing and the Plus/Delta Technique
In my last blog, I talked about the Nominal Group Technique, a quick and painless way to guide your team through a brainstorming task. Each team member gets a stack of Post It notes (or index cards or scraps of paper or whatever is available) and 5 or 10 minutes to silently and anonymously write down as many ideas as they can think of, with one idea per note card. When the time is up, the meeting facilitator (i.e., the Project Manager – you) collects the artifacts, reads them all aloud, and, once all the ideas have been heard, asks the group to begin discussing them.
There are many benefits to this exercise:
- Participants have time to organize their thoughts and are not influenced by ideas from others
- Participants are less emotional when writing down their ideas
- Less assertive team members are heard equally with more dominant members
- Ideas are de-personalized because they are submitted anonymously
Today I will give you some additional methods to use with the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), to maximize the many benefits of using this simple tool. › Continue reading…