Become Your

Own Business

Analyst, Gather

Requirements for

Any Project

Cathy Dew

Speaker Bio

Cathy Dew Consultant at Planet Technologies

Graphic Designer, Consultant and SharePoint MVP

Over 6 years of SharePoint

branding experience

Author: SharePoint 2010: Six in One

catpaint1 on Twitter

www.sharepointcat.com

Agenda

Ask the Questions

Analyze the Responses

Develop a Plan

Map Requirements to a Project

Ask the Questions

Depending on the Project Type the Questions

Differ

Avoid Technical Terms

Learn about the Business not just the problem

Adjust your questions to use the terminology of

the business

Sample of Switching Questions

Original Question:

Do you often share work documents with people

outside of your department?

Modified Question because department is not

valid in the company

Do you often share work documents with people

outside of your immediate work group?

Styles of Questions

Many ways to ask questions

Interviews

White boarding

Surveys

Game storming

Cater to Your Audience

Stakeholders

Technical

End Users

Group vs Individual

Groups are great to understand the business

and relationships

Individuals are great for details and

understanding a specific process from one

perspective

*Groups can be a challenge to do remotely

and if there is contention/disagreements

Order isn’t Important

The goal is to keep the conversation flowing

While we typically order questions by topic, its

best to encourage open conversation and go

with it.

Start Simple

Learn about the person and how they work first.

Be friendly

Don’t put them on guard

Make sure it is known you aren’t there to judge

Start out by saying it is a judgment free zone so be

honest in how you actually do things.

Personal Tips to Interviews

Watch body language

Are they guarded and you can tell they won’t

share real information

If it feels like you are pulling teeth, switch topics

and find another one to get them to talk

Its okay to tell them you don’t know if asked a

question that you really don’t know.

Tell them you will ask someone and get back to

them

Who to meet with?

It is great to meet with managers as well as

employees, but be careful to not put managers

in interviews with their staff

Starter Questions

What is the first thing you did when you got to

work today?

What kind of emails were you looking for?

Is there something you know you have to finish

before you leave today?

Top 10 Questions for

Governance

10. How Big is too Big?

Controlling the growth and size of your sites with

quotas will allow you to proactively manage the

size of your databases, ensuring that you remain

within supported size limits and that data is

recoverable in a timely manner.

9. How did that screwy file get there?

Creating a list of acceptable file types will help

you to control not only acceptable content but

also help to control site size. Also look at virus

protection and what you want on your servers

Top 10 Questions for

Governance

8. How Many is too Many?

Find out how many versions of documents people

use and need for their libraries. Decide how you

want to manage versions. Also look towards large

lists and how you will handle large item counts to

avoid non-supported lists.

7. Where Did that Go and How Do I get it Back?

Planning your Disaster Recovery and Backup

strategy is an important part of any SharePoint

implementation. Determine how long you can

wait and what content you are willing to

potentially lose to help guide you in this strategy.

Top 10 Questions for

Governance

6. When is a Site not a Site?

You should determine what decision points are

needed to create sites in your environment.

5. How Do I Make it Not Look Like That?

Determine what level of branding you would like

to use and how it should be applied. Take into

account new site creation behavior as well as site

templates.

Top 10 Questions for

Governance

4. When is it too Personal?

Then you can talk about how to manage what

properties are shown to whom and what kind of

information goes in them. – User Profiles

3. Would You Like Fries with That?

Adding customizations to your site can be tricky

from a management perspective. Whether these

are third party tools or custom development to

determine how you validate these solutions and

implement them for use.

Top 10 Questions for

Governance

2. How do I act Like the Wizard Behind the

Curtain?

Determining if you want to manage user

permission in a centralized or decentralized

structure is important and can help encourage

end user adoption

1. Can I Teach an Old User New Tricks?

The ultimate goal of any governance plan should

be to not hinder End Users actually using the

environment. Make sure you take into account

how your End Users Need to work and incorporate

that into your plan.

Analyze the Answers

This is the biggest challenge

Taking conversations and mapping them to

technical requirements

Example: I work with an excel spreadsheet that

only I need to edit, but multiple people need to

see, and they are always messing up with their

filtering.

Req: Use of Excel Services to display spreadsheet

information to multiple people, while restricting

editing to only a few.

Analyze

Best to document and start to map these

requirements in multiple types.

You will find the following types of requirements

coming out of the gathering process:

Business

Technical

Compliance

Report Issues or Concerns

Many times one of the most important things

you can capture are the items that can’t be

done by SharePoint alone

Custom Development

Not something that the product supports

Issues with lack of training for team

Validate before Planning

Once you have mapped out the requirements

based on analysis you will need to verify them

People to verify with:

Architect (your company or customer)

Developer (if needed)

Stakeholders

Why Validate?

This will help to either reinforce what is needed

or eliminate extra requirements before you

develop the plan of action

Develop a Plan

Write up the Project Proposal and show where

the requirements are covered

Somehow map them to the documents where you

analyzed… either by number, scope or some other

method

Requirement Creep

Don’t forget that requirement creep is what we

are trying to get away from, but will always

happen to some extent.

The more you gather, analyze and present the

easier it is to avoid this

But don’t get stuck in constant requirement

gathering only cycle

Thank you for

attending!

Cathy Dew, MVP

@catpaint1

www.sharepointcat.com