Hi community
I am co-running a requirements workshop for quite a typical intranet: Home area and Departmental sites team. I really want keep the meeting fairly business focussed ( so no HNSC discussions!) and ensure we capture the key requirements, ahead of my build phase.
I am thinking it would be great to have a number of documents to present/edit, so to capture business focussed requirements
- A spreadsheet to cover site columns, content types and meta data – I have got my first pre-filled draft of this
- A requirements table to which references at high level user story , id , intended audience and UI hints – is there a good example of word/pp/excel template for this? #notreinventingthewheel
- User Story in detail
- Test scripts to accompany User story
- ???
- Site Topology Visio diagram – quite good stencils out there as a starter
- potentially a bit of wireframe modelling tho I think this might be a bit too early for the team
Be interested to hear the thoughts of the community.
Daniel
Has anyone seen an illustration or template which can be used to explain this process to clients who are not tech-savvy? I need a visual aid to show clients in an effort to convince them to invite buy into smart governance (planning to assemble a team to begin documenting business requirements).
Ben
That does sound a good idea as it so interactive. I will have a look at that book to checkout this technique. I wonder also, if I should produce some User Cases as a result of my requirements sessions. I am looking for the users to build a series of tests for me to build against.
I incorporate Mindjet Mind Manager (but any mind mapping software will work – like XMind for instance) into my requirements gathering sessions. It provides an interactive way to diagram the site structure and gather metadata requirements (columns, content types, etc.).
By projecting the mind map on a screen and recording the dialogue as it is happening, it gets people discussing the options and you can quickly move things around within the mind map to get agreement among stakeholders in the meeting – really increases the productivity of the time you have.
Ruven Gotz documented this in his book, “Practical SharePoint 2010 Information Architecture” – Proven tools and techniques for architecting successful SharePoint deployments. It’s a great read.
You can then turn the mindmap into a PDF and email it to the participants at the end of the meeting.
Sound advice. I will check out BlueWorks
Excel usage as you say.
Use Cases now this is an interesting one . I was chatting to my co-presenter this morning re putting together a form to give to the users; to get them to describe in a controlled way, what they want to appear. I see a list of use cases on a work sheet with the detail outlined in this form.
Yep OneNote rules – it is a pity when cloud access is blocked :-(. What do you mean by Progress Overview?
The new Project Site template I used for the delivery plan is lovely … Has a summary widget to display what optional tasks on the timeline are late or whatever..
Capacity planning etc, I have been putting in Governance Plan also Microsoft have released this guidance SharePoint 2013 Governance Guidance.
Daniel
Hi Daniel
I draw the high level topology and site / list structure into Visio, as well as users processes. For more complex process modelling, i’m using Blueworks online, this tools is 100% BPM compatible. Detailed list and library settings are documented in Excel as well as the security map. Use Cases are visualised in Visio but documented in Word.
All other information like, capacity planning, user manuals etc … are managed within Word. OneNote is my favorite tool to share meeting notes and work in progress overview.
I must admit that my templates are always submitted to change because almost every project has another focus within SharePoint 🙂
Kind regards
Steven
