Research

• Before starting the analysis you should find out about:
  • The organisation, its background and business
  • The department(s) or business areas that you will be working for
  • The people you will be working with
  • Possible solutions
  • Prior knowledge of the organisation and its activities will help you ask appropriate and intelligent questions
    

Gathering Client/User Information

• In Website Design there are two groups you need to gather information from:
  • The Client who wants the website
  • The expected users of the website
• The Client can give you their requirements
• You may need specialist information in order to fulfil those requirements
• Identify all levels of users
• Users of a website can include:
  • External users – the customers or those needing the service the website supplies
  • Internal users - Managers for analyses to determine further strategies
• You can question the Client by:
  • Meeting face to face
  • Providing a survey
• The Client may suggest others you should talk to or survey
• The Client can provide some user information

Face to Face Meetings

• Can be “one on one” or “round table”
• Prior to the meeting, you should gather information about the subject to be discussed, for example:
  • Read your discussion notes from previous meetings
  • Read the department’s business plans
  • Browse your file of articles from trade journals
  • Remind yourself of any special terminology used by your client.
  • Know the names, titles and relations hips of the people involved.
  • Inform the Client of anything you need them to bring to the meeting
• Some pointers to successfully leading a meeting are:
  • You set the topic. Get them to talk.
  • You listen and steer with pertinent questions
  • Ensure everyone gets a fair hearing
  • Do not let a few people dominate the session.
  • Aim for consensus, but do not expect it all the time
  • After discussion of a topic, summarise the outcome.
  • Stick to the agenda
  • Handle lengthy sidetracks by calling a separate meeting
  • Stick to the stated timeframe – clients are busy people.
  • Remember to use “open” and “closed” questions appropriately
  • Take notes as you go – it is not usually possible to remember everything that is said
    • The Client may even think you are not taking them seriously

Surveys

• Are the process of obtaining facts and opinions from a range of people
• Can be undertaken by:
  • telephone questioning
  • written questionnaire
  • personal questioning
  • A combination of methods is often used successfully
• Surveys are helpful if you want the views of a range of people and / or if those people are geographically dispersed
• They follow a very structured format
• Questions are carefully worded beforehand and asked in the same sequence
  • some may be omitted depending on the responses to earlier questions.
• The following points need to be considered:
  • Questions must be unambiguous
  • Multiple choice answers must offer distinct choices where one of the answers can be selected
  • Leading questions must be avoided – example, ‘tell me why you think the system is bad’ implies that the system is bad
  • You need to include cross check questions to check the answers to earlier questions
• A prepared questionnaire can be the basis for a face-to-face meeting
• It can be sent to the users in advance to assist them to prepare for the meeting
  • Their answers can then be used for the basis of further discussion.
• You can prepare a set of questions to be asked at the meeting.
  • In this interactive situation you can seek elaboration on answers, or ask further questions.

Determining Business Function in Relation to a Website

• What business functions need to be represented on the site?
• How they should be represented?
• To assist representation:
  • Get to know the terminology of the business
  • Gather sample forms (inputs) and reports (outputs)

Analysing Business Activities

• What – data is used for this activity
• Where – it comes from and goes to
• Why – it is used
• How – it is used and possibly transformed
• Who – uses it
• When – it is used and how frequently

Documenting Functional Needs

• For each of the business functions you have defined, you should:
  • Describe the function briefly
  • Describe the data and where it comes from (inputs)
  • Define the processes that occur on that data
  • Describe the reports and other outputs
• The business function on a website must “connect” or “mesh” with the physical business function

Describing the Business Function

• Two or three sentences are usually sufficient to explain the purpose of the function
• A brief description is sufficient for providers of information technology solutions to understand what your requirements are
  • In a Team Project you may not be the one implementing the IT solutions

Describing Processes

• You need to describe the major activity or group of activities
  • This informs the supplier of IT solutions about the scope of the business function
  • They can then map their product/expertise to website needs

Outputs

• The term ‘outputs’ covers any report or form a user requires from the system, or any interface to other systems (such as a link to the head office accounting system)
• If the report is a standard output for this type of business activity, there is no need to define it – the title is sufficient
• For each non –standard output, you need to state:
  • Title, usage, purpose (in brief)
  • Major data fields, sequence, page breaks
  • How often it is needed, when it is needed (for example, at the end of each day)
  • Urgency (wanted immediately or overnight)

Unusual Situations

• Most business functions are very similar across organisations in the same industry
• Sometimes you will meet a situation that is not standard
  • If it is an important difference, and if there is good reason for the anomaly to remain, you must mention it in your report.

Other Considerations

• There are a number of other aspects that may be important, and need to be documented. They are:
  • Security
  • Audit
  • Backup
  • Restore
  • Data integrity
  • Data and transaction volumes
  • Processing cycles
  • Predicted growth
  • Archive and purge