Project: Plan an Elicitation Campaign

Project: Plan an Elicitation Campaign

Every technique covered in this tutorial — interviews, questionnaires, observation, document analysis, workshops, brainstorming, and prototyping — is powerful in isolation. The real craft of a business analyst is knowing which combination to use, in which sequence, with which stakeholders, and within what constraints. That synthesis is called an elicitation campaign: a deliberate, phased plan that drives your project from a blank page to a verified, agreed requirements baseline.

This lesson walks through a complete example. You are a senior BA hired by MedLink Clinic, a mid-size private clinic with three locations that wants to replace its paper-and-phone booking process with a unified digital appointment system. Your engagement starts today. How do you design the campaign?

Step 1 — Understand the Context Before You Plan

A campaign plan written on day one without any context is fiction. Before committing to a schedule of techniques, gather just enough information to make intelligent choices. Ask three opening questions:

1. Who are the stakeholders? — At MedLink: clinic director (executive sponsor), three branch managers, four doctors, eight receptionists, a finance officer, an IT administrator, and — crucially — patients. Each group has different needs, different vocabularies, and different availability.
2. What constraints apply? — Budget: moderate (can afford two workshops but not a six-week on-site observation). Timeline: go-live in seven months. Political sensitivity: the doctors are resistant to perceived loss of control over their schedules.
3. What do we already know? — The clinic has an existing paper appointment register, an insurance-billing spreadsheet, and a patient-satisfaction survey from last year. These are artifacts worth analysing before any interview is held.

Step 2 — Structure Your Campaign in Phases

Effective campaigns move through three broad phases, each building on the last. Think of it as a funnel: wide and exploratory at the top, increasingly precise and validated at the bottom.

Step 3 — Map Techniques to Stakeholders

Not every technique suits every stakeholder. A questionnaire sent to the clinic director is an insult to their time. Shadowing the IT administrator for a week would yield almost nothing. Match the technique to the person's role, knowledge type, and availability:

• Clinic Director — Structured interview (60 min). Goal: business goals, budget constraints, success metrics. One session, one follow-up email for clarification.
• Branch Managers (×3) — Semi-structured interviews (45 min each) followed by a shared JAD workshop. Goal: operational pain points, cross-location differences. The workshop reconciles the three managers' differing practices.
• Doctors (×4) — Observation (two half-days, two clinics) plus a brief questionnaire (10 questions). Goal: surface tacit scheduling behaviours and measure satisfaction with current process. Observation is chosen because doctors will under-report complexity in interviews.
• Receptionists (×8) — Observation (two days, peak booking hours) plus a JAD session. Goal: understand the actual booking workflow, exception-handling patterns, and paper artifacts in use. Receptionists are the heaviest users; invest the most time here.
• Finance Officer — Document analysis of billing spreadsheets, followed by a 30-minute interview. Goal: understand insurance claim tie-ins and reporting requirements.
• IT Administrator — Technical interview (45 min). Goal: integration constraints, infrastructure, security and compliance requirements.
• Patients (sample of 40) — Online questionnaire (7 questions, distributed via WhatsApp). Goal: understand booking preferences, preferred reminder channels, pain points with the current phone-only system. Patients cannot attend workshops, so an asynchronous channel is the only option.

Step 4 — Sequence and Schedule

Order matters. The output of one technique feeds the next. A common sequencing error is to run workshops before any individual interviews — the result is that senior stakeholders dominate and quieter voices are never heard. A better sequence for MedLink:

1. Week 1: Document analysis (paper register, billing spreadsheet, last year's patient survey). Produces a list of known processes, data elements, and known pain points to bring into interviews.
2. Week 2: Individual interviews with clinic director and branch managers. Use document-analysis findings as conversation starters. Produces business goals and high-level scope.
3. Weeks 3–4: Observation of receptionists and two doctors at peak hours. Produces workflow diagrams, exception lists, and tacit-knowledge notes. Distribute patient questionnaire in parallel (takes 10 days to accumulate sufficient responses).
4. Week 5: Analyse all data collected so far. Produce a draft "as-is" process model and a preliminary issues/requirements list. Circulate to branch managers for a quick email review.
5. Week 6: JAD workshop #1 (branch managers + receptionists). Present draft model, facilitate discussion of to-be process. Produce agreed functional requirements list and a short backlog of open questions.
6. Week 7: Doctors questionnaire closes; IT and finance interviews conducted. Resolve open questions from the JAD session.
7. Week 8: Produce a low-fidelity prototype (clickable wireframes of the booking screens). Share with three receptionists and two doctors for feedback.
8. Week 9: JAD workshop #2 — prototype walkthrough with all key stakeholders. Resolve remaining conflicts. Produce final requirements list for sign-off.
9. Week 10: Requirements document review and formal sign-off. Campaign complete.

Step 5 — Anticipate and Mitigate Risks

Every campaign hits obstacles. Planning for them is what separates a professional BA from an accidental one. The most common risks for the MedLink project, and their mitigations, are:

• Doctors refusing observation. Mitigation: frame observation as "understanding your workflow to protect your scheduling autonomy," not as "auditing your time." Get the clinic director to send a personal endorsement email first. Offer a 30-minute observation rather than a full day.
• Low questionnaire response from patients. Mitigation: keep the survey to seven questions, offer a 10-minute consultation discount as an incentive, send a reminder after five days. Accept 30 responses as a minimum viable sample.
• Workshop dominated by one branch manager. Mitigation: use a structured JAD facilitation technique — everyone writes ideas on sticky notes before open discussion, so the extrovert cannot drown out quieter voices.
• Scope creep during the JAD workshop. Mitigation: maintain a visible "parking lot" for good ideas outside current scope. Record them in a separate backlog, not in the requirements document. This validates stakeholders' ideas without letting them derail the current project.
• Key stakeholder unavailable during sign-off week. Mitigation: identify a designated decision-maker deputy for each stakeholder group at the project kick-off. This avoids a last-minute bottleneck.

Step 6 — Deliver the Campaign Plan Document

The tangible output of this step is a concise Elicitation Campaign Plan. For MedLink it would contain:

1. Project context — one paragraph: what MedLink is, what the project is, why it matters, key constraints.
2. Stakeholder register — a table listing every stakeholder group, their role, their interest in the system, their availability, and their preferred communication style.
3. Technique selection rationale — for each technique chosen, one sentence explaining why it was selected and what it will produce.
4. Stakeholder–Technique matrix — the single-page grid mapping who will be engaged how.
5. Schedule — the week-by-week plan with outputs and dependencies.
6. Risk register — at least five risks with likelihood, impact, and mitigation.
7. Assumptions and constraints — what you are taking as given (e.g., the director will approve all interview requests within three working days) and what hard limits exist (e.g., no more than two full-day workshops in the budget).

This document, typically two to four pages, is your contract with the project. It sets expectations, creates accountability, and gives you a baseline to manage against when things inevitably drift.

From Plan to Practice — Lessons From the Field

Three patterns distinguish campaigns that succeed from those that stall:

• Always start with what already exists. Document analysis costs almost nothing and yields enormous context. Analysts who skip it and go straight to interviews waste the first 20 minutes of every session explaining basics that a document would have answered.
• Separate discovery from design. The elicitation campaign answers what the system must do. It does not answer how it will be built. When stakeholders start sketching database schemas in a JAD workshop, gently redirect: "That is a great design question — let us capture it and bring it to the technical team. For today, I want us to focus on what the receptionist needs to be able to do."
• Confirm understanding continuously. After every interview, email a one-page summary back to the interviewee: "Here is what I heard. Does this reflect what you told me?" This closes the loop, catches misunderstandings early, and builds trust. Most stakeholders are pleasantly surprised that someone actually listened.

Summary

• An elicitation campaign is a phased, deliberate plan that combines multiple techniques in a sequenced, stakeholder-specific way.
• Phase 1 (Discover) uses document analysis, senior interviews, and observation to understand the as-is reality.
• Phase 2 (Elaborate) uses workshops, brainstorming, and broad questionnaires to define the to-be scope and resolve conflicts.
• Phase 3 (Validate) uses prototypes and walkthroughs to confirm requirements are correct, complete, and feasible.
• Match techniques to stakeholders based on their role, knowledge type, and availability — not habit or convenience.
• Sequence matters: run individual interviews before workshops, run observation before questionnaires about complex tasks, and distribute prototypes before the final validation session.
• Anticipate and document risks with mitigations before the campaign begins.
• The Elicitation Campaign Plan is a deliverable — write it, share it, and get it approved.