As a basic rule of thumb how much BA effort do you find goes into a Requirements Workshop?
If the workshop is for 6-8 participants and is for a duration of half a day (4 Hours), you have your preparation time (1.5 hours), reviewing notes, record requirements (6 hours), and if your lucky enough to only require 1 workshop a follow up to address any outstanding items or additional questions, again preparation and conduct ,(3.5 hours). Factoring in some time for scheduling as no-one is ever available at the same time (.5 hours) for the two meetings, means a BA's time spent to arrange and conduct a requirement workshop is 15.5 (fifteen and a half) hours.
Does that seem unreasonable?
We have some posts on JAD sessions which were in vogue in the late 90's but they capture the essence of the session. http://requirements.seilevel.com/blog/?s=JAD
Our experience is that you want to prep as much as possible before a session to get the most out of it by gathering as much of the requirements as you can before the session and use the session not to gether requirements but to hammer out conflicts or details. You want to go into a session with a strawman of some kind. We use a models based approach so we will try to have models prepared (you can find lots of articles on the models on our blog as well). At the very least we will have 1) business objectives 2) org chart, process flows 3) system context diagram and data diagram plus a list of requirements that map to the models.
For a 4 hour session maybe 20 -40 hours of prep and then about 3-8 hours per hour after after session. So maybe 9-32 hours after the session.
I also recommend having a scribe separate from the facilitator so double the hours in the session.
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