Interviewing

Project managers and business analysts can spend hours running through SWOT and decision analysis, reviewing system documentation, analyzing various use cases and scenarios, and setting up focus groups and survey questionaires, but ultimately all these techniques may not yield the types of information gleaned from simply interviewing project stakeholders.

An interview is a systematic approach designed to elicit information from a person or group of people in an informal or formal setting by talking to an interviewee, asking relevant questions and documenting the responses.

For the purpose of eliciting requirements, interviews are of two basic types:

• Structured Interview - where the interviewer has a pre-defined set of questions and is looking for answers
• Unstructured Interview - where, without any pre-defined questions, the interviewer and the interviewee discuss topics of interest in an open-ended way

Successful interviewing depends on several factors including, but not limited to:

• Level of understanding of the domain by the interviewer
• Experience of the interviewer in conducting interviews
• Skill of the interviewer in documenting the discussions
• Readiness of interviewee to provide the relevant information
• Degree of clarity in interviewee’s mind about what the business requires of the target system
• Rapport of the interviewer with the interviewee
• Rapport of the interviewer with the interviewee

In relation to other solicitation techniques, the advantages and disadvantages in using interviews are:

1) Advantages:

• Encourages participation and establishes rapport with the stakeholder
• Simple, direct technique that can be used in varying situations
• Allows the interviewer and participant to have full discussions and explanations of the questions and answers.
• Enables observations of non-verbal behavior
• The interviewer can ask follow-up and probing questions to confirm their own understanding
• Allows interviewees to express opinions in private that they may be reluctant to express in public

2) Disadvantages:

• Interviews are not an ideal means of reaching consensus across a group of stakeholders
• Requires considerable commitment and involvement of the participants
• Training is required to conduct effective interviews. In particular, unstructured interviews require special skills including facilitation/virtual facilitation and active listening
• Depth of follow-on questions may be dependent on the interviewer’s knowledge of the business domain
• Transcription and analysis of interview data can be complex and expensive
• Based on the level of clarity provided during the interview, the resulting documentation may be subject to interviewer’s interpretation
• There is a risk of unintentionally leading the interviewee