One of the most important things about Discovery is that any Discovery engagement is always, always a team exercise!
I can't stress enough that it's not only up to a BA or a Product owner or a Consultant to make it a success!
What is really important is that we assemble a professional, client-facing team that knows the business domain and the technology with an open-minded and collaborative spirit. Remember, no one knows it all! That’s why we bring various team members so that each may bring something to the table and share their expertise.
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Meet Your Discovery Team!
There are certain roles that you'll find in almost any discovery project. I want to underline, that these are roles, not necessarily job titles. Also, as sometimes it happens, one person may wear many hats and play many roles.
Of course, your company may have different roles or job titles, and certain engagements may require a unique skill set, like security lead, and brand strategist, however the ones we'll talk about here are the most common ones.
Consulting Lead
Consulting lead will organize and lead the cross-disciplinary discovery team. Typically this person has vast experience in the relevant industry or technology, as well as excellent client-facing and leadership skills.
This person acts as the lead of the discovery team and makes sure that the discovery is on track. For e-commerce solutions or other web implementations, we often see that the Consulting Lead most likely has user experience or research background, or experience in building similar websites before.
Business Analyst
Business Analysts will typically cover all aspects of gathering requirements, identifying dependencies, running the workshops and interviews, collecting all the relevant data, and making sure the collected information is captured and stored for further analysis and use by the rest of the team.
BAs are also instrumental in preparing the agenda for discovery workshops, preparing questionaries, and creating resulting discovery outcomes, like Project Backlog, MVP definition, Features, and User Stories.
Some project teams typically expect Business Analysts to capture meeting notes and even though it's everyone's responsibility, I tend to agree that BAs do note-taking better than anyone else!
Get more tools and guidance for business analysts to get prepared and run successful requirements Discovery:
Solution Architect
Solution Architect (sometimes called Technical Consultant) is crucial to identify and elaborate on all the technical aspects and constraints of the future solution. Even if the client has not set an eye on any specific platform to build the solution, having the SA on the team is important to understand all the aspects of reliability and security requirements.
More often though, companies know the technology or the platform (or a shortlist of platforms) that they would use for the build phase. In this case, the SA helps to map client requirements to the abilities or limitations of a specific platform.
For example, if the company is looking at the Salesforce Commerce Cloud to build its new e-commerce website, the SA needs to know what's available out of the box and what features will require heavy customization, hence costing to the client more.
Project Manager
Every team needs to have a person that keeps everyone on track. It's, therefore, a good idea to include a Project Manager on your discovery team, so that we can keep the logistics, schedule, and project plans organized and up to date.
Learn More
Interested in learning more? Check out my Discovery crash course on Udemy, where I teach business analysts and product owners all the basics of requirements discovery (typical stages, team structure, meeting types, outcomes, and common mistakes) within less than one hour!
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