Accelerating Business Analysis Requirements Workshop

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 IT Infrastructure and 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 Looking for more detailed directions? Watch the Organizer Training Series videos Looking for more detailed directions? Watch the Organizer Training Series videos

Desired outcome: A prioritized list of requirements sorted in mandatory/non-mandatory and functional/non-functional buckets.  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 Workshop Powernoodle:  Create the Powernoodle Session.  Create a Powernoodle question or questions that will capture the required input. For example: “What should the new system enable you to do?”  Invite all participants via into the Powernoodle Session.  Provide guidance to Participants at each step through the session to categorize and prioritize the ideas. 8

The Organizer’s job: In this Powernoodle, the Organizer will customise the Powernoodle and lead the group through 2 sessions. Encourage everyone to expand on their ideas, ask questions, or provide background information in the Comments. In the first session, the group will categorize the requirements ideas into Mandatory or Non-Mandatory. Continue through Voting and Prioritizing. After concluding the first session, download the Powernoodle Report. Next, the Organizer will reset the steps back to the start of Categorize and now the group will Categorize the requirements ideas into Functional or Non-Functional. Download the second Powernoodle Report. 9

Brainstorm – encourage Participants to add all their ideas in each Question. Categorize – sort requirements. In Session 1, the group sorts the ideas into Mandatory or Non-mandatory categories. Vote – set the number of votes per Participants and make sure everyone votes on most important requirements. Prioritize – ask everyone to assign limited resources to the requirements. Report – download the spreadsheet report to capture all input. Reset - After resetting, the group sorts the ideas into Functional or Non-functional categories. Steps in the Requirements Workshop Powernoodle. 10

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 11

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

Powernoodle Template: Accelerating Business Analysis Requirements Workshop by Larry Simon and Powernoodle Inc is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at and 13