I want to thank @swcalise on Twitter who requested a post about gathering business requirements. Throughout my career as an SEO and analytics consultant, I have always considered the most important step with every client to be the business requirements gathering stage. In my next 2 posts you’ll learn more about my approach and I’ll share my thoughts on the process.

Consider Your Purpose – Pause for a moment, take a deep breath and turn your mind to what brought you here in the first place. Given the ever changing environment of life on the web, and now with the global financial climate full of uncertainty - applaud yourself for having good business insight. It was that business sense that made you decide to track your web traffic and engagement - but what now? Are you actually intending to utilize the information you gather?

That may seem like an irrelevant question at this point, after all you purchased the software and now you’re ready to implement it (implementation only is worthy of an extensive post). Too often companies collect but don’t utilize their data, so I encourage you to make that your first point of discussion with each and every stakeholder interview - What are you going to do with this information?”

Determine Your Stakeholders- Who are the stakeholders? From small businesses to large corporations, you should know the answer to ”Who is the intended audience to receive and digest this data?” A small business may have only one business user who wears multiple hats, but sometimes this audience can be more challenging to assist in determining their business requirements from, than that of a large enterprise.

How They Digest The Data- Once you have established who the intended audience is, and before you dig in to what it is they need to know, determine how each business user wants to receive their information. With WebTrends we can customize dashboards and set up automated reports so the Executive Team receives their reports every Monday morning (or any frequency). The Marketing Team may expect their reports delivered as a PPT or dynamic spreadsheet.

Teams may want their data combined with external data sources for a more complete and intregrated picture. Helping stakeholders understand and begin to think about deliverables encourages them from the very beginning to own the data and put it to work for them.

Start From A Scoped Document- WebTrends for reporting is significantly more than just profiles and reports. If you enter into an engagement with WebTrends, a Business Analyst or Technical Consultant will use your Statement of Work (SOW) as a blueprint. The SOW lays out pertinent information from the number of profiles to whether your requested reports are all out of the box or customized. We use the SOW as our guide moving forward. If your license choice is 5 profiles then you want to make sure that those five profiles are set up to gather all the data your stakeholders are expecting to receive.

What About Profiles? – When setting up profiles, you may want to consider though that once you go into your actual Requirements Gathering what you had thought you may need might change – so keep an open mind. Many companies set up a profile for each domain while others may want one profile that includes both their main domain and their ecommerce domain so they can easily track conversions. Your business may be set up to address different market segments so you may want a profile that will allow for reporting across each of those.

I’ve set up profiles where the main profiles filter out all internal company traffic with a separate profile that captures only internal traffic because they wanted to track how their technical support or call center are utilizing their site(s) to respond to clients. This level of detail for setting up these particular profiles comes at the end of a vigorous round of interviews.

Dig Deep – Consider the Marketing Department for a moment. Marketers naturally want to know how their campaigns or initiatives are working, how successful they are to bringing in visitors that convert regardless of what that conversion activity is. To set up successful campaign reporting you need to know very detailed information. Dig deep, ask lots of questions and then formulate a strategy around reporting that will help your Marketing Team learn from the present campaign so they can bring that information into the next campaign to make it even more successful.

In my next post - we’ll be diving into education, details, details, details and I’ll provide 13 helpful hints on gathering requirements yourself.

Tags: business requirements, gathering business requirements

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Industry Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.