ANSWER

The Delphi technique is a method of harnessing a group's collective intelligence for the purpose of decision-making or forecasting.  The idea was developed by RAND Corporation as a way to forecast future events and trends in a rapidly changing environment.  The premise of the method is that group decisions often outperform decisions made by an individual person (assuming equal intelligence).

The Delphi method is a structured approach which works as follows:

• Define the problem to be solved, decision to be decided, or prediction to be made

• Identify group of experts in the given problem domain

• Conduct a series of rounds of anonymous surveys or questionnaires

• Gather feedback on the results of each round

• Organizer analysis the gathered responses

• Provide a summary of the results to participants, after each round

The Delphi method is designed to encourage open and unbiased communication among the participants, while also allowing for the aggregation and distillation of diverse and complex opinions.

A business analyst can use the Delphi method for a number of purposes such as:

• identifying industry trends
• performing risk analysis
• eliciting requirements
• making decisions
• etc.

For example, the Delphi method can be an effective way to elicit requirements from a diverse group of stakeholders to create a consensus view of the project requirements. The method can be particularly useful when dealing with complex or ambiguous requirements, where there may be multiple or even conflicting perspectives on what is needed.