Welcome back and thanks again for all the comments on the first post in this series. So without further adieu….

You Need More Detail – Just consider for a moment the landing page. It’s very common to set up a landing page to receive the visitor when they come in from an email or a banner. The landing page may include various elements from navigation to images that attach to links to a box that collects emails. Sure you can tell the Marketing Team that a 1000 visitors came in from a banner and 200 went on to purchase. Very helpful information, but through a comprehensive interview you may discover that the Marketing Team also wants to know how many visitors clicked over to find out more about the product.

They may want to know how many routinely return on the 7th day and purchase. This level of information can help them to modify their marketing campaigns to include an email blitz on the 5th day that will drive an even higher number of return visitors on the 7 day mark. You won’t know how detailed to set up the tagging and reporting if you haven’t gotten into the minds of the stakeholders who intend to utilize that information and it’s through these steps that you get there.

Education? It Might Be Needed- This is true for setting up Content Groups, I’ve seen real messes with reporting because the company set up a Content Group without really understanding what the stakeholder intended to get out of them. This in turn left them frustrated that they aren’t getting the information they were looking for. If they had taken the time to first understand what the Content Group is meant to do and then determined what it is they wanted from data, they could have easily got there.

These Steps May Help – Rather than go into every last detail (although I’ve covered a lot) of what I think is core to Business Requirements Gathering - let me leave you with a few helpful steps to get you started.

1. Start from a project scope document
2. Know your audience (stakeholder, business user/owner) who they are, what they want to know and how they expect to receive and utilize the data
3. You may need to provide a glossary of terminology to facilitate understanding through the interviews
4. Expect to ask a lot of questions, hold more than a few interviews and take detailed notes
5. Make sure the stakeholders understand the implications of their requests which may require that you educate as you go and answer whether this request is actually possible
6. It may help to review existing documents including business plans or market studies
7. Take a technical inventory. You must go through your website(s) step-by-step to fully consider all aspects, understand the hosting environment, the development cycle etc. Do not skimp on the phase.
8. Understand the current business environment and processes
9. Consider the future. What direction is the company planning to take over the next 3 to 6 months or the next year to five years?
10. Analyze the requirements and go back for more information if you need to
11. Prioritize needs
12. Plan to establish a method to measure the business requirements once defined and implemented
13. Write up the requirements into a document

Tags: business requirements, gathering business requirements

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 7:00 am 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.