As a business analyst, you have to be able to understand the needs of the business. In order to do this you have to obtain information, we use elicitation and collaborative techniques to do this.
Elicitation is the way in which information is derived from the stakeholders to discover the requirements for the solution while collaboration is when two or more people work together to achieve a common goal or objective.
Business analysts use both elicitation and collaboration to reach a mutual understanding on business analysis information. Elicitation and collaboration can be both planned or unplanned.
An example of an unplanned elicitation task are telephone calls while a planned activity would be an interview.
There are five tasks in the elicitation and collaboration knowledge area and they are:
a. Prepare for elicitation: this task involves informing the relevant stakeholders on what information they need to provide and the expected outcome of the elicitation and collaboration activity.
b. Conduct elicitation: This is the actual work that is done by the business analyst to gather the requirements of the stakeholder.
c. Confirm elicitation results: This task involves the stakeholders verifying the elicited information to confirm if it is actually what they need.
d. Communicate business analysis information: In this task the business analyst shares the confirm requirements with the stakeholders.
e. Manage stakeholder collaboration: to ensure that the elicitation and collaborative activities are successful the stakeholders have to be managed.
This task involves working with the stakeholder and involving them in business analysis process to ensure the success of the solution.