Interviewing 

What is it?

BABOK V2 defines an interview as a systematic approach for eliciting information from a person (or a group of people) in an informal or formal setting by asking questions and documenting the responses.

It is a discussion that helps you to identify accurate requirements quickly.

It helps you to understand high-level needs, assumptions, and constraints.

Due to the personal nature of the interview, the interviewee is naturally more comfortable compared to a group setting. This promotes openness and reduces misunderstanding. Eg The interviewee can be frank if he/she did not understand a question/concept/acronym and ask for clarification but may have been hesitant in a group setting.

Interviews can be held one on one or with small groups. Prefer a max of 2-3 people as going above that will introduce problems of group dynamics.

It can be formal or informal. You can lean towards the informal side as that will help the interviewee to be more open. He/she can then answer questions that otherwise would be uncomfortable e.g. if they were political in nature; if they are not following a process they can let you know so that you can investigate the reason and solve it with your requirement.

Keep the interview formal if senior executives are involved.

See the process/function/requirement from the interviewee’s perspective. By asking the interviewee for their ideas and thoughts on the identified requirements and other processes helps you to see the problem from another angle and discover what exactly they want from the future To-Be processes.

Types

• Personal Interviews:

It is a systematic discussion in which you ask scripted questions to the interviewee and document their responses.

You ask open-ended questions to get the interviewee to give more details about the question. This helps you to explore more to clarify and validate requirements while removing assumptions.

Moreover, you ask the same set of questions to multiple stakeholders. Ideally, all the responses should match. If it doesn’t then there is a conflict in the process which you can note as a requirement and then work on a solution in the analysis phase.

• Job Shadowing:

You understand a user’s or a user group’s typical workday by observing them.

You should ideally do this early in the project.

In most cases, a couple of hours to half a day of shadowing should be sufficient.

You understand various activities like the processes they follow, the systems they use, the tasks they perform, etc. You do not interfere with their work, however, you may ask an occasional question to gain clarity if required. You may also identify challenges they are facing that they are unaware of because that is how they have always done the tasks.

You can also treat job shadowing as a prequel to interview. Through shadowing, you can understand the process or tasks on your own through assumptions. You can then frame questions to explore the processes, tasks, and assumptions during the interview. Without shadowing it would be difficult to frame those specific questions as you then rely on verbal info, guesswork, and your prior experience.

During the interview, you will have your pre-decided set of questions AND the questions generated through job shadowing (the assumptions you made, their challenges you discovered, things they would like in the new system).

Job shadowing also helps you to build rapport. You will be working with the users for a long time. By spending a day with them while they work, you get to know them. You can genuinely appreciate and compliment them for their work and effort. This will help you to build trust and relationship with them which will help you not just during the interview but throughout the project life.

• Customer Site Visits

You visit the customer locations to understand the operational environment. This will help you to understand their everyday style/way of working and also to discover the environmental constraints if any.

• Task Analysis

This is different from job shadowing. Job shadowing is more passive while task analysis is active.

In task analysis, you ask the user to dedicate time to your efforts. You ask the user to walk you through his/her job and tasks that they perform daily, weekly, monthly, weekends, fortnights, etc.  You ask them how they perform and complete those tasks. This usually helps you to easily discover the areas of improvements and the places where the process could be made more efficient (create, modify, delete processes).

You can do task analysis at two locations; either at their work desk or in a separate room. Both have their own pros and cons and you should mix and match them to get the most out of it. If you perform task analysis at their work desk then you get to see the way they exactly work. The screens they use, the paperwork they do, other additional things, etc. But you will get constant distractions from others walking to them with their requests and tasks. When you do the task analysis in a room then you get their undivided attention but you don’t get to see them do their tasks in real-time.

You can understand the as-is process and the frequent tasks they do and ask questions on them to understand what works well and what does not.

Advantages of Interview

• Favors active discussion

Due to the inherent personal nature of interviews, you can ask open-ended questions to explore the details. The frequent to & fro and interactive conversation between you and the interviewee helps to build rapport and relationship with them.

• Identify discrepancies and conflicts about stated needs or requirements

Assume this scenario; you ask the same set of questions to multiple interviewees (of the same role). If you get different answers then you have identified a discrepancy or conflict which you can later resolve in the analysis phase.

The inconsistent requirements could be because the users  have misunderstood the process or are misinformed.

• Enable observation of nonverbal behavior

You can observe their voice tonality and body language to interpret the sub communication.

You can make assumptions, decisions, or ask for more details.

Eg They may verbally agree that they are following the process but their nonverbal behavior conflicts. You can then maneuver the conversation to unearth the reason. The reason could be a valid requirement.

• Ensures clear understanding

Unlike brainstorming and workshops, here you can ask questions and immediately paraphrase their answer to learn if you’ve understood right. If not you can discuss the details till both of you are on the same page.

Disadvantages of Interview

• Requires access and commitment of stakeholders

You need hours worth of time-commitment from individuals and groups. It is expensive for the company and they need to be aware of the burden this process would put on them. However, it is one of the best ways to ensure SMART requirements and a key to a project’s success. This needs to be communicated to the individual and others in order from them to prioritize this meeting.

• Creating scripted interview questions is a time-consuming process.

You cannot ask random questions to get the correct requirements. Hence, you have to research and ask detailed open-ended questions which is a time-consuming process.

• It is difficult for stakeholders to focus on the future system

Unfortunately, the stakeholders give requirements to improvise the current system. They struggle with visualizing the future system which may be completely different from the current system. Hence, you have to nudge, guide, and suggest the stakeholders think from the future system’s perspective and think of their needs from that system’s perspective.

E.g.

You: How do you want the system to be?

Interviewee: I don’t know. I am comfortable with the current system.

You: By doing this task this new way would simplify your work.

Interviewee: Right. I didn’t think of it. Let’s do it that way.

• The resulting documentation is subject to the interpretation of the interviewer

This is a tricky situation but cannot be avoided. By taking notes and being as clear as possible will help “you” to know the requirement which is more important than everyone understanding it.

• Transcription and analysis of interview data can be complex and expensive

Say you conducted 14 interviews. Now you have the following data for each interview:

• • • Interview preparation data
    • Actual interview answers
    • Post-interview notes

Now you have to analyze that data and convert it into meaningful information (i.e. requirements) so that decisions could be made from them.

Best Practices:

• Select the appropriate interview type to accomplish your goal

Based on the task-objective (problem to solve or challenge to overcome) select the appropriate interview type.

• Thoroughly prepare for the interview

Research and create a list of structured scripted questions.

Don’t be overconfident and not prepare for the interview even if you have years of experience.

Bad preparation will lead to

• • Many questions being unanswered as you didn’t ask them
  • Many questions having  low-level of details in the interviewee responses as they were poorly prepared and framed
  • Multiple interview round trips to get queries resolved
  • Wastage of time and resources

• Schedule interview ahead of time

It is difficult to get people to allocate time for interviews and giving them short notice will further dissuade them.

Don’t give short notice and call for the interview. The interviewee will be ill-prepared and in a poor frame of mind.

Inform them in advance for the interview so that they can plan their day & allocate time for the interview, and come prepared for the interview

• ALWAYS be on time

Be the first person to arrive for a meeting/interview.

Arrive 15-20 mins before the meeting and do the prep work; review the questions, review the bio of the interviewee (role, responsibilities, time in the company, etc). This will help you to drive the interview smoothly and also help you to build rapport with the interviewee.

Not being on time is the ultimate disrespect you show towards a person.

• Be excited about the subject and show genuine interest in it

• Match the pace of the interviewee

If they are cautious or if they talk slowly then talk slowly.

If they are in a hurry or they are talking fast then talk quickly.

• Paraphrase often

Summarise and repeat their response to check your understanding of the concept. You should have a crystal clear understanding of the concept or discuss it further until you have understood it.

You don’t have to do it for every question but do it for every concept or idea (a concept can have multiple questions)

E.g. After you have paraphrased and asked them to confirm they may say, “You are close, but I misspoke about this idea and I actually meant this”. This way you saved yourself from building a conversation around a wrong idea.

• Let the interviewee know what will be done with the information

An interviewee allocates a large portion of his/her time for the interview. Hence, it is a good idea to let them know what will be done with the info.

You could say, “Hey, I am gathering the details of the specific process. It is really important that I get your information as you are the one who works with the system every day and I don’t, you are the expert, you are the one who deals with these certain pain points. I want to be sure that I am solving it for you. This information that we have gathered today I shall be documenting it in a requirements document and we will make sure we can fit in as much as possible in the solution design to help you out in your processes and the way you work with the system.”

This will help you to get their trust, their buy-in and they will be more engaged throughout the project.

• If possible, record the interview.

Inform the interviewee that you will be recording the interview. It is only for your personal use in case you need to revisit the interview to gain more clarity on a point.

You don’t have to revisit the interview recording always but only if needed. It is a good-to-have feature.

• Interview them in a secluded area/meeting room

Get the interviewee’s undivided attention during the interview

• Ask for examples of their issues and document screenshots

Request the interviewee to explain their issue with real-life examples and/or screenshots of their screens

To better understand the answer to certain questions you can request the interviewee to take a screen-shot of various screens in advance and explain the answer with the help of the screenshots. If you have already job-shadowed them then you may have the screenshots yourself and you don’t ask from them.

• Interview 2-3 users for each category you are targeting

Say, you have a question to understand the employee onboarding process of the HR department (category)

You must interview 2-3 users from the HR department who perform the employee on-boarding process.

One may be technically savvy and would look at the system differently than the one who is less technically savvy and has a different visualization of the system. This way you’ll get multiple perspectives of a system and you could design a solution that’ll accommodate different user groups.

• Be sure the interview the actual user (end-users) of the system and not just the senior management

Sometimes, the senior management may insist on interviewing them only and not the end-users as they have put the process in place and know it completely. Never agree to this!

A process may be in place but maybe:

• • It has been modified
  • It is not being followed

Hence, always interview the end-users as they are actual users of the process/system and they know it well as they deal with it on a daily basis and are aware of the pros and cons of it.

Inform the seniors that the perceived process and the real process are often different. By interviewing the actual users you can understand what they are doing and why they are doing so that the systems/processes can be adjusted and made compatible for everyone.

• Create thank-you email appreciating their time and how the information will help create quality requirements

The interviewees are giving their time which they may have to cover by working overtime and hence show genuine gratitude for this.

Send the thank you email with the interview invite.

• Create the follow-up email telling the person how the information will be used and the next steps for the project

In the email:

• • Give a brief summary of the interview
  • Inform them of the future steps
  • Appreciate their effort

Let the person feel it was a positive experience and not a waste of time by him/her not feeling that nothing is going to change and this was just a formality

Send this email at the earliest after the interview.

• Allow time in the schedule to debrief and finish documentation after each interview

Don’t line up the interviews consecutively without allowing time to review and assimilate the individual interview notes.

If you do it all at once later you will surely lose crucial details.

How to ask Interview Questions

• Make questions open-ended

If the answer to a question is binary e.g. yes/no, true/false, etc then it is a close-ended question.

If the answer to a question is to quantify data then it is a close-ended question e.g. How many participants do you need? How much data in Gigabits is present in the current system?

For questions like these other types of elicitation technique is suited e.g. surveys

Open-ended questions force the interviewee to elaborate e.g. By asking questions beginning with “How” you can encourage the interviewee to provide more details.

You can almost make any close-ended question open by reframing it.

E.g.

Close-ended question: Do you fill forms each time?

Open-ended question: How do you provide details each time?

• Avoid questions that may present judgment or conclusion

As the lawyers say, “You do not want to lead the witness.”

E.g.

Leading question: Don’t you think the current process is inefficient? If may force/lead the interviewee to say “yes”.

Instead, you could ask: What are your pain points with the current system if any?

• Allow the interview to flow

Don’t ask questions in a choppy or discreet way.

Ask questions in a natural conversation style.

This is a skill and comes with experience.

 

Contents of an interview document file:

• Name of the interviewee
• Role and Responsibilities of the interviewee (Name, Role, etc helps you to prepare for the interview and also to know the interviewee to build rapport with him/her)
• Open-ended questions
• Space for the answer (You can have multiple sheets depending on the answer; e.g. if you need diagrams to understand a process)
• Section to note interviewer’s insights (This is not to do with interviewee’s answer but your personal observation; You can also flag items e.g  requirement, new requirement risk, assumption, constraint, etc)

 

Sample Interview Questions:

• What are other ways to accomplish this goal?
• Tell me about your frustrations with the process?
• What makes a good day? A bad day?
• If you could wave a magic wand and make it different, what would the process look like? (This is usually a follow-up question to the previous question)
• What standards or regulations should we be aware of?
• What purpose is accomplished by using the product or process?
• What equipment, tools, templates, and inputs do people need to use it?
• How long should tasks take?
• What people do you share information with?
• What failures cause the organization the most pain?
• What I didn’t ask that I should have?
• If we could change just one thing in the process, what should it be?

The post is  based on my notes and understanding from this BA tutorial