Facilitation and Requirements Elicitation Workshops

Is requirements gathering slowing down a critical project?   Is it difficult to reach consensus on the project scope?   Do you need help to clarify business needs?

If you’re typical, at least half your meetings are unproductive.  You need to transform seemingly disconnected data into a problem statement, requirements specification or request for proposal, and you need to do it quickly while the changes can made a difference.  A collaborative workshop, facilitated by an expert, cultivates communication across organizational boundaries and uses structured approaches to tap into the wisdom of groups. 

Our workshops yield mutual understanding and ownership of decisions.  Working with you, we design an active workshop process tailored to your needs and objective.  A sampling:

• Seeking to jump-start your project?  A guided workshop can help you plan and scope the effort.
• Need to baseline your current environment?  A series of process workshops can evaulate the ‘as-is’ people, process and technology elements that are in place and identify problem areas and opportunities for improvement.
• Ready to define a better way?  Our requirements elicitation workshops can help you define the business requirements and the measurements for improvement solutions.
• Using an Agile approach to change?  Our solution realization workshops help you conduct the cycles of defining and prioritizing value-based functionality.

Why use an outside vendor to facilitate workshops and to elicit requirements?    A practiced facilitator external to your organization can provide an unbiased, independent view that gets all the relevant information on the table without pre-judgment and is able to apply their skills full-time to just the purposes you need.  Why use DEA?  Well, because we’re good at it.  We have built deep expertise in guiding discussions and decisions; we use visualization techniques to make concepts clear; we make sure that views from all relevant stakeholders are represented; and we reduce the decision-making timeframe by using stakeholder time wisely. 

We’re experts in face-to-face meetings as well as in conducting virtual sessions with attendees distributed across time zones.  Whether your workshops involve just local participants or the attendees are distributed, DEA has the expertise to customize a highly productive working session or series of sessions. 

• Co-located workshops are conducted on-site in your facilities or off-site to avoid distractions
• Distributed workshops accommodate differing availability and are conducted by blending synchronous (same time) and asynchronous (any time, in threaded fashion) activities.  Using state-of-the-art tools for virtual collaboration, DEA oversees the logistical complexities and moderates the sessions.

Principles of DEA workshop design:

• Business-driven outcomes informed by your own subject matter experts
• Dramatically reduced time to produce reliably high-quality deliverables
• Neutral facilitation of best practices for consensus-building and decision-making
• Visual thinking techniques to enhance communication and expand innovation

As highly experienced facilitators, our role is to work with groups to ensure meetings run well and achieve a high degree of consensus.   DEA professionals are equipped to handle every type of requirements workshop with a customizable process to suit your circumstances and business objectives.  

Contact DEA at info@doreenevans.com and let us know how we can help your project.