COURSE 2300 | 2-DAY SESSION
Designing and Facilitating JAD Workshops

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A comprehensive hands-on guide to conducting JAD/group sessions that effectively and rapidly elicit real-world requirements

JAD Workshops significantly reduce your project scope, decrease your timeframe, and result in measurable overall savings. This course gives you hands-on experience planning and conducting JAD Workshops: Learn powerful techniques to quickly mine the collective knowledge of your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and get the tools to put these elicitation methods to work immediately.

Learn how to:

• Use facilitative skills to effectively mine group knowledge
  
• Brainstorm creatively to identify requirements
  
• Structure JAD Workshops for maximum productivity
  
• Acquire needed information, regardless of your systems development approach
  
• Obtain consensus and buy-in easily
  
• Build related components of the systems development lifecycle
  
• Clarify the scope before "scope creep" becomes an issue
  
• Deal with difficult participants
  
• Increase contribution by building a structured, project-oriented workshop atmosphere
  
• Significantly collapse calendar time by using facilitative approaches
  

JAD (Joint Application Development) sessions, are structured meetings of business and systems representatives for the purpose of defining business requirements and deciding other aspects of proposed systems. Using a structured approach, visual aids, and language that is very much the customers’, JAD Workshops extract high-quality business requirements specifications in a compressed time frame. The participants are focused, the process is facilitated, and the result is greatly enhanced understanding for all those involved.

Why are Requirements Workshops (JAD Sessions) Beneficial?
From the customers’ viewpoint, the focus of an effective JAD Workshop is on the“what” and not the“how” of what their system must do and be. The session results in consensus and clarity about the requirements. From a developer’s viewpoint, the session outputs—the models, definitions, and process descriptions produced—comprise a clear, unambiguous specification of the customers’ business requirements.

What are the benefits of Facilitative Techniques?
Capers Jones, Chief Scientist Emeritus of Artemis Management Systems and Software Productivity Research, has studied JAD Workshops. He concluded that such workshops:

• Reduce scope creep from 80% to 10%
  
• Increase delivery speed of early phases by 30-40%
  
• Increase function points by 40-85%
  
• Result in 5% to 15% overall savings in time and effort for entire project
  

In-Class Workshops and Group Exercises:
Effective facilitation is easy to watch but harder to do. No matter how well you know your agenda and meeting plans, it requires specialized skills to stay on topic, handle disruption, keep people on task, and achieve consensus. Planning the mechanics of a Requirements Workshop requires additional attention and knowledge of requirements gathering, idea generation, and information capture. You will learn all the tips, tricks and shortcuts used by world-class organizations to accelerate information gathering. Specifically, you will:

• Learn how to build meeting structures that avoid most pitfalls.
  
• Deal with the difficult people and problems that plague meetings.
  
• Use creative techniques to mine participants’ knowledge.
  
• Employ deft techniques to obtain consensus.
  
• Extract, document and prioritize requirements efficiently in group settings
  
• Maximize effectiveness and make the best use of business customers' time through skillful techniques.

20 Immediate Benefits of Taking This Class

1. Learn techniques for skillful facilitation.
   
2. Effectively coordinate and organize meetings for maximum productivity.
   
3. Extract information in a variety of ways - brainstorming, cardstorming, categorization, etc.
   
4. Minimize the probability of scope creep.
   
5. Greatly collapse calendar time for requirements gathering.
   
6. Apply the techniques to improve a variety of other types of meetings.
   
7. Use facilitative techniques in group settings to build Context Diagrams, Class Diagrams, Use Cases, and Entity Relationship Diagrams.
   
8. Learn different methods for prioritizing requirements in a group setting.
   
9. Learn the simple, mechanical techniques of capturing information easily and correctly.
   
10. Avoid pitfalls to ensure active participation of all parties in a session.
    
11. Appreciate the flexibility and usability of Post-It™ notes in solving problems.
    
12. Identify viable solutions to complex problems.
    
13. Understand how to assist the business in relevant activities beyond requirements.
    
14. Use a variety of tools to solve problems.
    
15. Keep energy and interest high during meetings that last several hours or days
    
16. Use effective questioning and listening skills to extract requirements
    
17. Learn how to apply the facilitative approach to other processes such as strategic planning, lessons learned, and planning.
    
18. Build high-level plans in a group setting easily and accurately.
    
19. Evaluate alternative approaches and reach consensus.
    
20. Learn innovative techniques to improve requirements development quality.