Facilitated workshops
“Facilitated Workshops” is a tool/technique for the process “Collect Requirements”.
Facilitated workshops are focused sessions that bring key stakeholders together to define product requirements.
Workshops are considered a primary technique for quickly defining cross-functional requirements and reconciling stakeholder differences. Because of their interactive group nature, well-facilitated sessions can build trust, foster relationships, and improve communication among the participants, which can lead to increased stakeholder consensus. In addition, issues can be discovered earlier and resolved more quickly than in individual sessions.
For example, facilitated workshops called joint application design/development (JAD) sessions are used in the software development industry. These facilitated sessions focus on bringing business subject matter experts and the development team together to improve the software development process. In the manufacturing industry, quality function deployment (QFD) is another example of a facilitated workshop technique that helps determine critical characteristics for new product development. QFD starts by collecting customer needs, also known as voice of the customer (VOC). These needs are then objectively sorted and prioritized, and goals are set for achieving them. User stories, which are short, textual descriptions of required functionality, are often developed during a requirements workshop. User stories describe the stakeholder who benefits from the feature (role), what the stakeholder needs to accomplish (goal), and the benefit to the stakeholder (motivation). User stories are widely used with agile methods.
“Facilitated Workshops” is a tool/technique for the process “Define Scope”.
The participation of key players with a variety of expectations and/or fields of expertise in these intensive working sessions helps to reach a cross-functional and common understanding of the project objectives and its limits.
This definition was found in the PMBOK V5
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