Chapter 6 Determining System Requirements

1. Modern Systems Analysisand DesignFourth Edition Chapter 6 Determining System Requirements

2. Learning Objectives • Describe interviewing options and develop interview plan. • Explain advantages and pitfalls of worker observation and document analysis. • Explain how computing can support requirements determination. • Participate in and help plan Joint Application Design sessions. • Use prototyping during requirements determination. • Describe contemporary approaches to requirements determination.

3. System Requirements Determination

4. Characteristics for Successful Requirements Determination • Impertinence • Impartiality • Relaxing constraints • Attention to details • Reframing

5. Deliverables of Requirements Determination • From interviews and observations • Interview transcripts, observation notes, meeting minutes • From existing written documents • Mission and strategy statements, business forms, procedure manuals, job descriptions, training manuals, system documentation, flowcharts • From computerized sources • JAD session results, CASE repositories, system prototype displays and reports

6. Traditional Requirements Determination Methods • Interviewing individuals • Interviewing groups • Observing workers • Studying business documents

7. What is Interviewing? • Dialogue with user or manager to obtain their requirements • Two forms: • Open-ended: conversational, questions with no specific answers in mind • Closed-ended: structured, questions with limited range of possible answers

8. Guidelines for Effective Interviewing • Plan the interview. • Prepare interviewee: appointment, priming questions. • Prepare agenda, checklist, questions. • Listen carefully and take notes (tape record if permitted). • Review notes within 48 hours. • Be neutral. • Seek diverse views.

9. An Interview Guide is a document for developing, planning and conducting an interview.

10. Issue with Individual Interviews • Advantages • Easier to schedule than group interviews • Disadvantages • Contradictions and inconsistencies between interviewees • Follow-up discussions are time consuming • Only one at a time

11. Group Interviews • Interview several key people together • Advantages • More effective use of time • Can hear agreements and disagreements at once • Opportunity for synergies • Disadvantages • More difficult to schedule than individual interviews

12. Nominal Group Technique (NGT) • A facilitated process that supports idea generation by groups. • Process • Members come together as a group, but initially work separately. • Each person writes ideas. • Facilitator reads ideas out loud, and they are written on blackboard. • Group discusses the ideas. • Ideas are prioritized, combined, selected, reduced.

13. Other Approaches • What is DirectObservation? • Watching users do their jobs • Can provide more accurate information than self-reporting (like questionnaires and interviews) • What is Document Analysis? • Review of existing business documents • Can give a historical and “formal” view of system requirements

14. Analyzing Procedures and Other Documents • Types of information to be discovered: • What problems exist with the existing system • Are there opportunities to meet new needs • What’s the organizational direction? • Who are the “key stakeholders • What are the values of the organization • Are there any special information processing circumstances • What’s the history of the current system design • Are there rules for processing data 7.14

15. Analyzing Procedures and Other Documents (cont.) • Four types of useful documents • Written work procedures • Describes how a job is performed • Includes data and information used and created in the process of performing the job or task • Business forms • Explicitly indicate data flow in or out of a system • Reports • Enables the analyst to work backwards from the report to the data that generated it • Descriptions of current information system 7.15

16. Written work procedure is a business document that formally describes work processes, provides useful information regarding system functionality and logic.

17. Potential Problems with Procedure Documents • They may involve a duplication of effort • They may be missing procedures • They may be out of date • They may contradict information obtained through other sources

18. Formal vs. Informal Systems • Formal • The official way a system works as described in organization’s documentation • Procedure documents describe formal system • Informal • The way a system actually works in practice • Interviews and observation reveal informal system

19. Business form is a document that contains useful information regarding data organizations and possible screen layouts.

21. Contemporary Methods for Determining Requirements • Joint Application Design (JAD) • Brings together key users, managers, and systems analysts • Purpose: collect system requirements simultaneously from key people • Conducted off-site • Group Support Systems • Facilitate sharing of ideas and voicing of opinions about system requirements

22. Contemporary Methods for Determining Requirements (cont.) • CASE tools • Used to analyze existing systems • Help discover requirements to meet changing business conditions • System prototypes • Iterative development process • Rudimentary working version of system is built • Refine understanding of system requirements in concrete terms

23. Joint Application Design (JAD) • Intensive group-oriented requirements determination technique • Team members meet in isolation for an extended period of time • Highly focused • Resource intensive • Started by IBM in 1970s

24. Prototyping • Quickly converts requirements to working version of system • Once the user sees requirements converted to system, he will ask for modifications or will generate additional requests • Most useful when: • User requests are not clear • Few users are involved in the system • Designs are complex and require concrete form • History of communication problems between analysts and users • Tools are readily available to build prototype

25. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) • Search for and implementation of radical change in business processes to achieve breakthrough improvements in products and services • Goals • Reorganize complete flow of data in major sections of an organization • Eliminate unnecessary steps

26. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) • Goals (cont.) • Combine steps • Become more responsive to future change • Identification of processes to reengineer • Key business processes • Set of activities designed to produce specific output for a particular customer or market • Focused on customers and outcome • Same techniques are used as were used for requirements determination

27. Business Process Reengineering (cont.) • Identify specific activities that can be improved through BPR • Disruptive technologies • Technologies that enable the breaking of long-held business rules that inhibit organizations from making radical business changes

29. Overcoming Resistance to Change • Resistance to change is inevitable: • Expect it • Resistance doesn’t always show its face: • Find it • Resistance has many motivations: • Understand it • Deal with people’s concerns not their arguments: • Confront it • Only one way to deal with resistance: • Manage it

30. “The Fad That Forgot People”Thomas H. Davenport • “. . no one wants to ‘be reengineered.’ No one wants to hear dictums like, ‘Carry the wounded but shoot the stragglers’” • “No one wants to see 25-year-old MBAs in their first year of consulting making $80,000 per year with $30,000 signing bonuses, being billed out at six times their salaries, putting the company’s veteran’s through their paces like they’re just another group of idiots who ‘can’t think out of the box’.”

31. Top Ten Ways To Fail At BPR • Don’t reengineer but say that you are • Make sure you know what BPR is and do it, not something else. • Don’t focus on processes • Only processes can be reengineered, first you must identify them. • Spend a lot of time analyzing the current situation • Understanding your processes is essential, but you must limit the time spent on unproductive analysis. • Proceed without strong executive leadership • Weak leadership will doom you to failure.

32. Top Ten Ways To Fail At BPR • Be timid in redesign • Leaders must stretch people to think outside the box; rewards for creative ideas is a must. • Go directly from conceptual design to implementation • Create a ‘lab’ setting to test your changes. • Reengineer slowly • To maintain momentum you must produce results quickly. • Place some aspects of the business off-limits • BPR in isolation won’t work. Everything must be on the table.

33. Top Ten Ways To Fail At BPR • Adopt a conventional implementation style • BPR requires its own fast, improvisational, iterative style. • Ignore the concerns of your people • You must take into account the personal needs and feelings of the people who will be so directly affected by your changes.

34. Summary • In this chapter you learned how to: • Describe interviewing options and develop interview plan. • Explain advantages and pitfalls of worker observation and document analysis. • Explain how computing can support requirements determination. • Participate in and help plan Joint Application Design sessions. • Use prototyping during requirements determination. • Describe contemporary approaches to requirements determination.