An important part of selling anything is fully understanding your customers needs.  This is ever-so increasingly important when selling technology solutions.  This week I have a series of customer meetings with an ongoing theme to illicit business requirements that will help to assist in the recommendation of software application’s that will drive and achieve intended productivity goals.  Here are a list of five illicitation techniques I use when gathering business requirements:

1. Shadowing/Observation – Job shadowing allows an observer to study an end user perform their work in order to understand workflow.  Some business analysts will actually do the work to gain a solid understanding of the work.
2. Use Cases – a method that tells a story about how a system will be used to achieve a goal from the perspective of a user of that system.  The goal should be to help a technical expert and non-technical people alike understand how the behaviour should be.  Use cases should be used to organize and document the functional requirements of an automated system.
3. Storyboards – Stake holders and developers working together by drawing up the elements that are believed to be a part of the application.  By leveraging story boarding along with probing questions you will gain a good thorough review of your customers workflow.
4. Prototyping – capture the look and feel of the user interface by drawing screen shots, screen flows and so on.
5. Structured demonstrations – If your purchasing an application, getting the end users to use the system for normal tasks is a very effective way of finding out what is missing in an application.

Use a variety of these techniques and ask a lot of questions.  Gathering requirements is often tedious work, but is the most important activity that ensures your customer get’s what they want every time!