The gathering of requirements, commonly referred to as elicitation, is an important phase in any Salesforce implementation or customization project. Elicitation creates the groundwork for a successful outcome by ensuring that the ultimate solution fits the needs of everyone involved.
For example, elicitation was needed to successfully implement the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform for a major online car dealership in the United Kingdom, and to integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization and CDP for a multinational online entertainment application in Austria.
Effective communication, among other skills, is essential while eliciting requirements for a Salesforce project. Experts in charge of implementation projects such as business analysts, consultants, or admins, interact with various stakeholders, including executives, technical staff, and end users.
They listen actively, ask the right questions at the right time, and communicate clearly to ensure everyone’s on the same page.
Storytelling, Communication, and Social Skills
Effective and straight communication is the key to requirement elicitation. It entails knowing technical requirements and the organization’s overall business objectives. Strong social and storytelling abilities contribute to the development of rapport and trust, both of which are required for open and honest communication.
When stakeholders feel heard and understood, they are more likely to contribute useful information and feedback.
User Stories
A user story helps to transform technical requirements into simple ideas – they are brief descriptions of a feature written from the user’s perspective.
User stories describe users’ roles in a Salesforce system, their desired actions, and what they hope to accomplish. User stories do not define the complete demand, but rather, provide a summary of it.
User Story Workshops
I encourage you to hold a user story-writing (brainstorming) workshop just after the beginning of a project. These workshops are organized for the entire project team, including the product manager(s), developer(s), administrator(s), UX designer(s), users, plus others. Participants use brainstorming to produce narrative ideas.
As user stories evolve, the entire team’s creativity should be utilized– the original user stories are not set in stone. The benefit of user stories is that they promote iterative development and may be refined as many times as necessary.
When developing user stories with your project team, avoid making assumptions about how they will be executed, such as which components or services will be impacted. These decisions are made during planning sessions by the development/implementation team.
Detective Work With Six Key Questions
Aside from the user stories, you cannot start without answering the essential questions that will determine the general course of the project. These questions are almost identical to the ones we answer whilst developing any of the articles on this website: Who, what, where, why, when, and how.
Essentially, you operate like a reporter or detective; assessing the situation, determining the truth, and deciding on the next steps. Doesn’t that sound exciting?
What These Key Questions Mean:
- Who: Who are the stakeholders? Who’s involved? Who follows the process itself? Who hands things off?
- What: What happens first? What happens next? What is the problem that we are attempting to solve?
- Where: Where is the information entered? Where does the information go once it is entered? Where would a person be while performing this?
- Why: Why do we do this? Why is this important?
- When: When will this happen? Once every week? Every first day of the month? When will we need a solution?
- How: How does this work today? How should this work?
Engage and Motivate the Stakeholders
Engaging stakeholders early and often is critical. Begin by identifying all key stakeholders and determining their roles and responsibilities. Who are they? Where are they? Again, it all comes to the aforementioned communication and story-telling skills.
Schedule regular meetings and workshops to obtain feedback and keep them updated on the project’s progress. Use surveys and interviews to get comprehensive requirements and feedback.
Consider the Project History
Similar to the stakeholders, it is critical to fully understand the project’s background. For assembling the Project History, you will require both the stakeholders as well as additional sources.
The Project History ensures that you do not unintentionally repeat previously completed work or make the same decisions. It also helps you grasp the current systems, design, requirements, and business processes.
The more you know, the better your next step, analysis, and project outcome will be. Do as much study as possible on the processes and systems involved to gain a better understanding of how the business functions and how the systems work.
Elicitation Means Discovery
The majority of commercial or technical needs originate from stakeholders or end users. You can’t expect to find everything in the documentation. When information isn’t easily available, it must be elicited, or, in other words, discovered.
Several elicitation methods can be used, but you must first determine the project’s requirements before selecting the most appropriate elicitation approach or methodologies.
Some key methods are:
- Brainstorming:
- A group meeting that generates a significant amount of problem-solving ideas. Participants are invited to think freely and contribute as many ideas as they desire, with no criticism.
- Focus groups:
- A moderator oversees a small group of people as they discuss a given issue. This strategy facilitates the gathering of varied viewpoints and insights.
- Interviews:
- Acquiring information through direct, face-to-face communication. Interviews may be organized, semi-structured, or unstructured, depending on the degree of freedom in the questions asked.
- Requirements workshops:
- Collaborative sessions in which stakeholders discuss and identify project needs. These seminars promote consensus and ensure all needs are addressed.
- Surveys/questionnaires:
- Collecting information from a large number of respondents. Surveys typically include a series of questions designed to collect quantitative or qualitative data.
- Document analysis:
- Studying and evaluating materials to extract useful information. It entails discovering, selecting, evaluating, and synthesizing data from documents.
- Interface analysis:
- Identifying and defining the interactions between various systems or components. It ensures that all pieces of a system perform effectively by analyzing the inputs and outputs at each interface.
- Process modeling:
- Representing the steps, activities, and flow of a process. It produces visual diagrams that help in the understanding, analysis, and improvement of business processes.
- Prototyping:
- Developing an early model or version of a solution to test and enhance ideas. Prototypes help in detecting problems and getting feedback prior to final development.
Make Sure to Document Everything That is Important
As a project owner, you will create and modify documents throughout the project’s lifecycle. Keep in mind that you must develop and update documents for a range of stakeholders participating in a project, as well as display them in a variety of formats and media.
Document types include printed documents, information repositories, screenshots, and websites and blogs. You produce and use only the most appropriate document formats for each project.
We’re going to go over a few of the most common document types:
- Glossary of terms
- This is a list of key terms and definitions that boost understanding across teams involved in the project.
- RACI chart
- It stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. It’s a matrix that delineates who is responsible for what in the context of the business analysis effort.
- Business Case
- It describes solution options, their comparisons, and recommended solutions based on parameters relevant to the organization.
- Use Case
- It identifies, defines, and organizes the system requirements from the perspective of a user.
- Business Analysis Plan
- It lists all the business analysis activities that will take place throughout the project.
- Business Requirements Document (BRD)
- Requirements for the project (Change Initiative) are described from the customer’s perspective.
- Stakeholder analysis
- Who you should talk with to understand the business problem
- Who can help flesh out the requirements
- The individuals who can give you a range of perspectives
- System Requirements Specification Document (SRS)
- This document details how the complete system should function and enumerates the hardware, software, and functional and behavioral requirements of the system.
- Gap Analysis Document
- This document describes the gaps between the current processes and the intended processes.
- Change request logs
- This document is a log of all the change requests in the project, including the date of request, requester, and any other key information
The Power of Analysis
To learn about and understand as much as possible about a project, its owner – typically a business analyst (BA) or consultant – conducts a range of analyses. They then write a report outlining the findings of the investigation and provide suggestions to stakeholders.
It is critical to learn and comprehend an organization’s structure, including who reports to whom and how departments interact with one another. The knowledge you obtain here will enable your team to successfully collaborate and communicate (more on that in the following unit).
There are various types of analysis:
Enterprise Analysis
First, you need to gain an understanding of an organization’s structure, including who reports to whom and the activities and relationships of its departments. The knowledge you obtain here will enable your team to successfully collaborate and communicate.
Strategy Analysis
This is about getting to the heart of the problem. First, you determine the business need, strategic or tactical in nature.
Then, the Gap Analysis. You observe the current state and define the future and transition states that will meet the business requirements. The Gap Analysis identifies the difference between the existing and desired states. Now, evaluate the possibilities for achieving the desired state, including the work or scope required, and offer the most valuable strategy to accomplish it.
You should also consider the risks associated with the selected change solution, as well as the impact such uncertainties may have on the project’s lifecycle or end goal. Create a plan of action to handle probable threats.
Stakeholder Analysis
Stakeholders are the individuals or groups (internal or external to the immediate organization) who make decisions and who have an important role in determining the priorities and requirements for your project. Because of this, it is essential to identify the stakeholders early on. To identify your stakeholders, start with this measurement: anyone who has an interest in, or may be affected by, the issue under consideration.
Collaboration and Project Management Tools
Without Collaboration and Project Management Tools, the implementation project cannot begin or be completed. These tools will help you manage requirements more efficiently by enabling collaboration, documentation, traceability, and customization.
They can also assist you in avoiding common mistakes in the requirements-gathering process, such as poor communication and insufficient documentation.
Document, Presentation, and Collaboration Platforms
- Google Workspace: This suite includes Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, making it excellent for real-time collaboration and document sharing.
- Microsoft 365 is well-known for its powerful suite of tools, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams, making it suitable for remote work and mobile productivity.
- Apple iWork consists of three core applications: Pages (word processing and desktop publishing), Numbers (a spreadsheet application), and Keynote for presentations.
Project Management Tools
- Jira is Atlassian’s project management and issue-tracking software. It is frequently used by software development teams to plan, track, and manage agile projects.
- Trello is well-known for its straightforward and visual approach to project management, which incorporates boards, lists, and cards. It’s suitable for remote project management.
- Asana is a tool that helps teams organize, track, and manage their work. It’s particularly handy for tracking project progress and meeting deadlines.
- TeamGantt is an online project management tool that utilizes a visual timeline to help users plan, schedule, and manage their projects. It has several features, including charts, task comments, file sharing, calendar views, and Kanban boards.
Messaging and Chat Tools
- Slack is a popular messaging platform (owned by Salesforce) for teams that include channels, direct messaging, and connectors with numerous other programs. It is ideal for team communication and collaboration.
- Microsoft Teams is a part of Microsoft 365; it integrates workplace chat, meetings, file storage, and application integration.
- Discord was originally popular among gamers but has grown into a sophisticated platform used for business collaboration. It supports voice, video, and text chat, as well as capabilities like screen sharing and custom servers, making it suitable for teams that require constant communication.
Video Conferencing Tools
- Zoom is known for its reliability and capacity to manage massive video calls. It has features such as breakout rooms, virtual backgrounds, screen sharing, recording, and connection to different productivity applications.
- Microsoft Teams integrates team chat and video conferencing, making it a good choice for organizations that already use Microsoft 365. It allows large meetings, webinars, and live events, as well as file sharing and customizable backgrounds.
- Google Meet is suitable for Google Workspace users, as it integrates easily with Google Calendar and other Google products. It allows high-definition video calls and has a simple user interface.
- Cisco Webex Meetings is well-known for its high-quality video and security capabilities. It’s suitable for organizations that value secure, high-quality video conferencing.
Final Thoughts
Elicitation, or the gathering of requirements, is a crucial phase in Salesforce implementation or customization projects. It creates the groundwork for a successful outcome by ensuring that the solution addresses given requirements. Effective communication is essential throughout this process, including active listening, asking the proper questions, and clear communication among Business Analysts, Consultants, Administrators, and other stakeholders.
This open communication encourages stakeholders to share useful information and input, which is essential to the project’s success.
Comments: