Successful discovery requires careful planning and execution. To do so, you'll need to run various types of meetings with different stakeholders, such as kick-offs, show-and-tells, interviews, and workshops. In this article, we'll explore each meeting type, share some tips, and discuss how to handle tricky situations you may face during the discovery process.
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General Recommendations
As soon as you arrive on-site, you will meet various people on the client side, including line managers, data entry personnel, call center staff, and senior stakeholders. You will also encounter IT professionals, designers, and possibly third-party vendors. It is essential to build strong, long-lasting relationships with all of them. These personal relationships will be vital in establishing your authority and positioning yourself as a trusted advisor and partner. To set yourself up for success in running on-site workshops, there are some general recommendations you should follow.
To ensure a smooth on-site workshop, it is crucial to communicate the workshop's agenda and schedule beforehand. Include at least 10-20 minutes during the kick-off meeting to walk the client through the schedule and reiterate your goals. Keep in mind that all client personnel have their day jobs and are only allocated to your discovery part-time, so they will appreciate extra guidance in understanding the agenda and how things will be organized.
Each meeting must be actively facilitated to ensure that it has a clear goal and the audience is actively participating towards that goal. You should not simply let the meetings flow and hope that the client will provide all the necessary information or draw all the business process diagrams on the whiteboard for you. Instead, you will need to work on it and ask questions, leading the audience in the right direction. As you do so, try to sense who is most active in the room and work with those individuals after the meeting on action items and follow-ups. This will help cement relationships.
Facilitation does not mean that you are the star of the show. Your job is to collect information and gain insights from those who know the client's business best. Therefore, proactively encourage participation from everyone. When someone shares an idea or mentions a pain point, ask others to chime in with their perspectives. For example, you can ask, "Do you agree with this?" or "What is your perspective?" You can also ask if a particular requirement or feature is a priority for them or their department.
Building trust with your clients starts with small things such as being on time, ensuring that equipment works properly, and capturing meeting notes. It is also essential to track action items and follow up on them. For instance, during a product information workshop, someone may mention new product metadata being developed by another department. You can ask for a sample and capture this request in a register of action items with the person's name. Then, work with your project manager to review the list (ideally daily) with the client to ensure that everything is on track.
Meeting Types
During the discovery phase, you will run various types of meetings, including large meetings with tens of people, deep-dives, and 1-on-1 interviews. It is essential to understand which type of meeting works best for each situation. Let's explore these meeting types and discuss their benefits and best practices.
The kick-off meeting is a special type of meeting that is often formal. Typically, it is the first meeting on the first day of the discovery phase, where people meet and greet each other for the first time. The goal of the kick-off meeting is to set the foundation for the duration, team, goals, schedule, and outcomes of the discovery. During this meeting, the discovery team is introduced to the client people. It's a good idea to include a slide in the PowerPoint deck with smiling photos of the team, and during quick intros, not only mention your job title but also explain your role on the team and, most importantly, the artifacts or outcomes you plan to produce.
Show-and-tell meetings are walkthrough sessions where the client shows us their existing process or technology tool. You can use show-and-tells to see how the client manages products or news articles on their website, for example. They also work well for technical deep dives, where we ask the client's IT team to walk us through their existing APIs or data analytics solutions.
Interviews are an effective way to gain a deep understanding of users' needs, pain points, and behaviors. By conducting one-on-one interviews or small group discussions, you can gather qualitative data that is difficult to obtain through other methods. During an interview, you can ask open-ended questions to allow the interviewee to share their thoughts freely. You can also probe deeper into certain areas to get a more detailed understanding of a particular topic.
Workshops are an effective way to harness the collective brainpower of stakeholders, gain valuable insights, and generate innovative ideas through collaboration. However, it's important to use workshops in a structured manner. It's recommended to have preliminary conversations, show-and-tell sessions, and interviews to gain individual perspectives and understand the current processes before conducting workshops. Workshops can be used to define future processes, review different design iterations, identify cross-departmental dependencies, prioritize requirements, and define the common vision for MVP.
As you progress through the discovery process, you'll find that there are other types of meetings that become necessary. For example, you may want to schedule daily huddles with your internal team to reflect on progress made during the day and plan for the next day. You may also need to have regular sync-ups with your offshore team to keep them updated on new requirements that have been uncovered. For longer discovery projects that span several weeks, it's important to schedule regular check-ins with the client to review action items that have been collected, as well as weekly and daily plans for the discovery team.
Navigate Risks
As you run your workshops and interviews, it's important to be prepared for specific situations and deal with different types of people:
Respect different opinions and be people-smart. Your goal is to elicit valuable information and build relationships, not to prove your point.
Be a good partner and facilitator to build healthy relationships and show the value of your work.
Be prepared to handle difficult situations and people, such as demanding client personnel or competing vendors. As a consultant, it's crucial to keep your cool and focus on what's best for the client and the project. Don't hesitate to seek help from your colleagues if needed.
Conclusion
By understanding the different types of meetings and when to use them, you can efficiently gather valuable information, build relationships, and generate ideas. It's important to approach each meeting with respect for different opinions, be a good partner and facilitator, and be prepared to navigate difficult situations. Remember, the goal of the discovery phase is not just to gather information but also to build relationships and lay a strong foundation for the rest of the project. By following best practices and being adaptable, you can ensure that your discovery meetings lead to a successful project outcome.
Learn More
Interested in learning more? Check out my Discovery crash course on Udemy, where I teach business analysts and product owners all the fundamentals of requirements discovery (typical stages, team structure, meeting types, outcomes, and common mistakes) within less than one hour!
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