What is a JAD Workshop?
JAD (Joint Application Development) sessions are structured meetings of business and systems representatives for the purpose of defining requirements and deciding other aspects of proposed systems. Using a structured approach, visual aids, and language that is very much the customers’, JAD Workshops extract high-quality requirements specifications in a compressed time frame. The participants are focused, the process is facilitated, and the result is greatly enhanced understanding for all those involved.
JAD Workshops significantly reduce your project scope, decrease your timeframe, and result in measurable overall savings. This project management training course gives you hands-on experience planning and conducting JAD Workshops: Learn powerful techniques to quickly mine the collective knowledge of your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and get the tools to put these elicitation methods to work immediately for functional, non-functional requirements as well as use cases and Agile/Scrum user story workshops.
Capers Jones, Chief Scientist Emeritus of Artemis Management Systems and Software Productivity Research, has studied JAD Workshops. He concluded that such workshops:
- Reduce scope creep from 80% to 10%
- Increase delivery speed of early phases by 30-40%
- Increase function points by 40-85%
- Result in 5% to 15% overall savings in time and effort for entire project
- Learn techniques for skillful facilitation.
- Effectively coordinate and organize meetings for maximum productivity.
- Extract information in a variety of ways – brainstorming, categorization, prioritization, etc.
- Apply the techniques to improve a variety of other types of meetings.
- Learn different methods for prioritizing requirements in a group setting.
- Learn the simple, mechanical techniques of capturing information easily and correctly.
- Avoid pitfalls to ensure active participation of all parties in a session.
- Appreciate the flexibility and usability of Post-It™ notes in solving problems.
- Understand how to assist the business in relevant activities beyond requirements.
- Keep energy and interest high during meetings that last several hours or days
This course is also available publicly via Live Virtual Classroom: