The Director, the Union and the Three-Hour Workshop
You are the business analyst at a logistics firm replacing its dispatch system. Three groups matter: dispatch supervisors, the drivers' union representative, and finance. You scheduled a three-hour requirements workshop. The operations director has invited himself, opens by recommending a specific vendor product, and talks over others. Two supervisors dial in remotely. The supervisors disagree about how overtime should be assigned; the union representative says the current informal workaround is effectively contractual. Six weeks remain to define requirements, and a vendor demonstration is booked in two weeks. No facilitator or scribe has been assigned.
1. How should you prepare for and structure the workshop given the director and the remote participants?
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Preparation is the intervention. Before the session:
- Meet the director privately. Agree his role and reframe the conversation from products to objectives: ask what outcome he expects the dispatch system to produce and what evidence would show it. Capture his vendor preference in a decision log rather than letting it anchor the room. If he wants to observe, agree that explicitly.
- Define purpose, scope and decisions. A workshop needs decision points, not just a topic. Put on the agenda: current dispatch process, overtime assignment, exception handling, and the specific decisions required.
- Send pre-reads: a draft current-state process model and overtime volume data, so time is spent on judgement, not transcription.
- Assign roles. You cannot facilitate, model and scribe at once. Bring a facilitator and a scribe, and use round-robin or silent idea generation to stop the dominant voice setting the frame.
- Plan for remote participants: dedicated check-ins, a shared model visible to all, and a named person watching the remote channel.
Structure the agenda so the highest-conflict topic is not last, when energy and time have run out.
2. The supervisors disagree on overtime assignment and the union says the workaround is contractual. What do you do with that?
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Treat it as a requirement source, not noise. The disagreement is evidence that the rule is undocumented and contested, which is exactly what a replacement system must not silently encode.
- Elicit the rule, not the opinions. Ask each supervisor to walk through recent examples: who was offered overtime, in what order, and why. Compare against the informal workaround.
- Establish ownership. The BA does not adjudicate a contractual question. Capture it as an open item with a named owner (HR, legal, or the operations director) and a decision date, and record the assumption made in the meantime.
- Model both options so the cost of the ambiguity is visible in design and testing.
- Keep the union representative engaged as a stakeholder, not an obstacle. An unresolved contractual constraint is a constraint on the solution, and discovering it after go-live is far more expensive than discovering it now.
- Timebox the debate. If it cannot be decided inside the workshop, park it in the decision log with an owner and move on; do not let it consume the agenda.
3. How should you confirm and communicate the elicitation results?
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Confirmation is a distinct activity, not an afterthought, and it should happen within about two business days while recall is fresh.
- Send a consolidated package: process models, the decision log, the open-item log with owners and dates, and a plain-language summary of what was agreed.
- Ask for confirmation by group, not as a crowd. Supervisors, union representative and finance each confirm from their own perspective; silence is not agreement, so ask for an explicit response.
- Distinguish confirmed from assumed. Mark anything not explicitly validated as an assumption with a risk note.
- Store under version control in the requirements repository so the demo in two weeks is built from confirmed inputs.
- Send the director a short summary of decisions and open items, which keeps his product preference in the record without reopening the debate.
Unconfirmed elicitation results are drafts, and treating them as agreed is how rework enters a project.