Investigation Techniques - Ch. 5 Flashcards
When and why would you use the interview technique? And what are its pro’s and cons?
Pros
•Build relationship with business stakeholders
•Yields important information
•understand different viewpoints and attitudes across the business
•investigate new areas that arise
•collect examples of documents, forms and reports currently used
•study of the work environment
Cons
•Time consuming
•expensive
•busy schedules
•opinion from one perspective
•requires follow up from further investigative work
- Make initial contact with key stakeholders and establish a basis for BA work
- building & developing rapprt with SBUs
- Acquiring a range of information about the business situation, including personal issues and problems.
- Focus on:
- current functions that need to be fuliflled in new system
- problems with current operations
- new features required
Preparation
- Who? What? When and Where? Why? How?
- STOP
- Strategic - Terms of Ref; MI, Agree Approach
- Tactical - performance issues, targets, management control. Overview of processes and functions currently in place. New business requirements.
- OPerations - Description of existing business situation, identification of problems and workarounds currently in palce. Source documents, bottlenecks, flow of work,volume of work (estimate needing verification).
Structure
- Intro & Scene setting
- Q&A
- Summary & Next Steps
What is observation and when would you use it?
What types of observation are there?
And what are its pro’s and cons?
Pros
- Provides a much better understanding of the problems and difficulties faced by business users
- Aids in devising workable solutions, fitted tot he working environment, that are more likely to be acceptable to the business.
Cons
- You change what you observe
Types
Formal observation (specific task)
Protocol Analysis (perform and describe each step)
Shadowiing (following over a period e.g. 1-2 days)
Ethnographic studies (extended period of time, up to several months, int the target environment)
Why hold a Workshop?
And what are its pro’s and cons?
Pros
•gain broad view of area under investigation
•increase speed and productivity
•obtain buy-in and acceptance
•gain a consensus view or group agreement
Cons
•time-consuming to organise
•if not carefully facilitated it may be dominated by a forceful participant
•it can be difficult to ensure participatns have the required level of authority
Objectives
- discuss issues
- resolve conflicts
- elicit requirements
- analyse quality of requirements set prior to formal documentation
Name 3 discovery techniques, and tell me how and where you would use them.
brainstorming/idea storming
calling out ideas that are written on a glipchart/whiteboard for evaluation at the end
round-robin discussions
participants asked for their ideas in turn
brainwriting/post-it notes
partipants write down ideas that are collated and grouped
stepwise refinement
statement or idea - keep on asking “Why” to every answer given until we have gotten to the heart of the problem, idea or situation
break-out groups
working on stories or scenarios, fed back into plenary session
Name 3 documentation techniques, and tell me how and where you would use them.
Process Models
Rich Pictures
Mind maps
Context diagrams
Use case diagrams
Task scenarios
What is a focus group and why would you use it?
And what are the pros and cons?
Pros
A good way to understand people’s attitudes to any current shortcomings
Cons
Can only be used as part of information-gethering as the findings must be evaluated and assessed against the strategy and objectives of the organisation, and therefore should not be relied upon to produce definitive requirements
No requirement for consensus view or ownership of decisions made or solutions identified
- Concered with business and market research
- Brings together a group of people with a common interest to discuss a particular topic
What are Scenarios, or Scenario Analysis, and how are they used?
What are the pros and cons?
Pros
Require users to include each step and transitions between steps, removing the opportunity for omissions
Step-by-step development approach helps ensure there are no taken-for-granted elements and many of the problems of tacit knowledge are addressed.
Developed using ‘top-down’ approach, starting with overview scenario then refining with further detail, aiding the business user visualise possible situation and removing uncertainty
Provide a basis for developing prototypes
Scenario definitions can be used for preparing acceptance test scripts
Cons
Time consuming to devlop and can become very complex, especially where there are several alternative paths. (In this case treat each alternative path as a separate scenario).
PROCESS
- Identify task or intereaction for modelling
- Identify steps to be carried out
- Define control conditions governing the transition between steps
- Identify alternative paths
MORE DETAILS
- Telling the story of a task of transation
- Definition of a scenario includes definition of other aspects, such as actors responsible for carrying out tasks, preconditions, postconditions.
- Provides a framework for discovering exeption situations that require alternative paths to be followed wheny carrying out the task.
- Very useful to assist with risk nalysis ‘MISUSE CASES’It helps users who are uncertain about what is needed from a new business process or system to visualise it more clearly
- Useful when analysing or redesigning business processes as it traces the actions initiated by a business event that have to becompleted in order to achieve a successful otucome
How would you document scenarios?
UML, storyboards, activity diagrams, task models, decision tree diagrams
What is Prototyping, how would you use it?
What are the Pros and Cons?
Pros
Clarifies uncertainty on the part of the analyst and confirms to the stakeholders that the analyst has understood what they asked for
helps stekholders identify new requirements and gain an understanding of what the system will be able to do
demonstrates the look and feel and aids elicitation of usability requirements
validates system requirements and identies errors
provides a means of assessing the navigation paths and system performance
Cons
Prototyping cycle can spin out of control with endless iterations
if purpose not explained clearly the users may think that when they are happy with the mock-up the system is complete and ready for use
user expectations can be raised unnecessarily if the prototype fails to mimic the final appearance of the system or its performance, e.g. response times standalone vs system with 1,000 users
What is Prototyping
Technique for eliciting, analysing, demonstrating and validating requirements.
Builds simulations of a system in order to review with users, in order to increase understanding about requirements.
When and why would you use Questionnaires?
What are the Pros and Cons?
Pros
Cost effective
Ability to quesiton large amounts of people in a wide geographic area
Cons
Have to be designed carefully to encourage more returns and avoid ambiguity/leading questions
Prone to low returns
- When you need to get a limited amount of information from a lot of people and interviewing them all would not be practical or cost effective.
What are Special Purpose Records?
What varieties of Special Purpose Records are there?
What are the Pros and Cons?
Pros
Activity Sampling: Quantifiable data about the number of times an activity is carried out per day by the group studied
Document Analysis: useful to supplement other techniques such as interviewing, workshops and observation. Provides a clearer picture of how the organisation works in that area, the processes that are followed and key items of information used to carry out the work.
Cons
Needs buy-in from respondees before taking part
Has to be realistic about what people can be expected to record
Activity Sampling
- Idetify activities to be recorded, including ‘not working’ and ‘not related’
- Decide on frequency and timings
- Visit study group at times decided upon and record what each group member is doing
- Record results
- After set period, analyse results
Document Analysis
Review samples of documents to uncover inforamtion about an organisation, process or system.
- how is document completed
- who completes
- are there any validations or controls
- who uses the document
- when is the document used
- how many are used or produced
- how long is the document retained and it what form
- what are the details of the information shown on the document
- where is the ifnormation or data obtained
- are other names used in the organisation for any of the items of data
What are Rich Pictures?
What are the Pros and Cons?
Pros
Provides an overview of an entire business situation
Shows the human characteristics of the business situation such as culture of the organisation
Can be enriched further as more information about the situation comes to light
Cons
None
What are Mind Maps?
What are the pros and cons?
Pros
Summarises a lot of information in a simple visual form that highlights connections between different ideas and topics
Provides a means of structuring and organising ifnormation while representing all of the issues that have been uncovered about the situation
Cons
None
What are Business Process Models?
What are the Pros and Cons?
Pros
Invaluable diagnositc aid: helps identify problems such as bottlenecks, delays and duplicate tasks
Easy to draw and accessible to stakeholders
***see note re BPMN though
Cons
BPMN - too many symbols can make it confusing for the business user to understand
What is a Business Process Model?
A swim lane diagram showing all the tasks carried out in a process, the actors responsible for carrying them out and the flow of the process.
What is a spaghettic map?
What are the Pros and Cons?
Pros
Physicality of task: Swim-lane diagrams do not show physical movements required for actors to carry out tasks whereas Spaghetti maps do.
Best used in conjunction with swim lane diagrams.
Cons
None
What is a spaghettic map?
Shows the movement and interactions of stakeholders when performing tasks and processes.
