Requirements Are Not in the Videos

The unstructured data pitfall

The COVID pandemic forced everyone to change their ways of working. Teams that thrived on co-location had to recreate the team spirit through web conferencing and online collaboration. Facilitators that always had a marker in their hand had to learn and embrace online whiteboarding and infinite collaboration canvas tools. And everyone learned how to record a meeting.

After “You are on mute”, the next most popular phrase of the remote working era must have been “Are we recording this?”

Recording virtual meetings turned out to be easy. Automatic captioning (albeit imperfect) doesn’t require special effort. Cloud storage can expand seemingly endlessly. Having recordings meant that busy colleagues could accept two or three conflicting meetings and flip between them effortlessly, showing up and tuning out, and knowing they can always watch a full recording.

This gave growth to a new phenomenon in the business analysis world: an illusion that the requirements can be captured in meeting recordings.

As analysts started facilitating virtual requirements sessions all day long, it turned out that not everyone was comfortable capturing notes and user stories on the shared screen. The apprehension of being on display was strong for those less experienced. Others, knowing their audience well, expected that every sentence they type and every point they capture in a shared zone during the meeting will be criticized and dissected or will take their audience off track. They preferred to make notes off-screen, out of sight of meeting participants.

Virtual meeting facilitators started to produce more paper notes than from in-person meetings. Why?

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