According to the BABOK® Guide, brainstorming is one of the 16 required techniques in the fundamental knowledge base of an effective business analyst. Why would this creative information gathering technique be a required competency for a business analyst? Let’s have a look.
Brainstorming targets creative thinking about a problem in order to come up with a set of new ideas, options, and approaches. The approach taken to brainstorming is twofold: a creative and wide-open idea generation session followed by idea reduction activities.
In order to conduct a brainstorming session, the business analyst steps through three stages – preparation, idea generation and idea reduction:
Preparation:
Idea generation:
Idea reduction:
The success of brainstorming sessions depends upon the willingness of the participants to actually participate and contribute. It is essential that ideas not be debated during idea generation in order to maximize contributions from the group. Personal feelings and organizational politics should also be set aside during the session, if possible.
Well, that is our closer look at one of the 16 recommended techniques used by business analysts, brainstorming. I have found this technique to be of great help on many projects, for requirements elicitation and also for project planning. Give a shout if you have another BABOK® technique you would like to explore in more detail!
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