Accelerating Business Analysis Requirements Elicitation and Analysis

This Powernoodle Solution was developed with the help of Powernoodle Expert: Larry Simon Larry Simon and his company the Inflection Group provide business analysis, IT management advisory, e-business and enterprise architecture services to a broad range of companies, public sector organizations and early stage businesses. Before founding the Inflection Group, Larry was a senior partner at Ernst & Young Canada Consulting where he had national responsibility for E&Y’s facilitation and solution delivery centres. While at E&Y he also served as the firm’s Chief Methodologist and Chief Information Officer. He was also previously the Head Judge of the Canadian Information Productivity Awards and on the faculty of the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management. He has over 2,000 classroom hours of experience teaching IT strategy, business analysis, project management, TOGAF and IASA Foundation courses. He is currently on the Ontario Board of CIPS (Canada’s association of IT professionals) and is the Cloud Computing research lead for IT Market Dynamics. Connect with Larry on LinkedIn: ub/larry-simon/0/147/26 2

Powernoodle sessions help you bridge the gulf between business people’s understanding of their business and the specialist knowledge of IT people. Using Powernoodle, groups quickly and respectfully make decisions that everyone understands, supports and is willing to implement. Powernoodle is an Accelerator for Business Analysis 3

This guide will provide you with clear guidance on how to organize and facilitate requirements workshops using Powernoodle. You will learn how to:  Accelerate involvement by stakeholders  Produce better, more valuable outcomes by including more stakeholders and building consensus as you go Incorporating Powernoodle 4

Intuitive Design and Familiar Process You can customize every Powernoodle session to generate the outcome you need. 5

Using this guide: A Powernoodle session has an Organizer and any number of Participants. This guide is designed for an Organizer and discusses some features of Powernoodle that are available only to the Organizer. This guide also contains information about the role of Participants in a Powernoodle session. 6

Desired outcome: A detailed list of requirements.  Gather requirements on a wider basis than would otherwise be possible by including more people.  Gather requirements from people who are in other geographies.  Gather requirements from people in other time zones or do shift work. 7

It Starts with the Right Question. To create the requirements elicitation Powernoodle:  Create the Powernoodle Session.  Create a Powernoodle question or questions that will capture the required input. For example: “What are the requirements you see?”  Invite all participants via into the Powernoodle Session. Looking for more detailed directions? Watch the Organizer Training Series videos Looking for more detailed directions? Watch the Organizer Training Series videos 8

The Organizer’s job: 1.Create sticky notes in the Brainstorm step for the following areas: Functionality, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Operability, Security, Compatibility, Maintainability, Transferability. 2.Add the definition in the Comments area. 3.Invite users into the Powernoodle and ask them to add their requirements for each area in the Comments section. Remind them to read the definitions posted there first. 4.Download the spreadsheet report which captures all input in their own words. 9

For detailed examples and directions, you can:  Watch the Powernoodle Organizer Training Series videos.  Log in and visit the Help section.  Contact us at  Join the Powernoodle user groups online. Powernoodle help and support 10

11 Website: Twitter: Join Larry in the Powernoodle Group on LinkedIn.com

Powernoodle Template: Accelerating Business Analysis Requirements Analysis by Larry Simon and Powernoodle Inc is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at and