As the name suggests, this type of requirement gathering involves discussion with the business users on the functional deliverables. The functional requirement mainly talks about the final output that the user wants to have as project delivery.
Functional requirement gathering should always start with the senior management, like the CEO, CFO, COO, and CIO. This will help you understand the BI strategy which the senior management is looking for. It is always the senior management which has the capability to influence the overall adoption of the BI reporting, thus understanding their requirements becomes an important factor.
When the project is large and multiple modules needs to be captured under the Qlik Sense project implementation, the functional requirement becomes little tricky, because there is always a challenge of deciding from where to start. In such a case, you as a consultant should select the requirement which seems to be the most critical and difficult for the business currently, the one which is consuming the maximum amount of time to generate the insights in data. The reason is, if you deliver that critical requirement on or ahead of time, you will set a positive impression with the client and that will be like a quick win for you. Additionally, it will give you more confidence to finish other deliverables ahead of time.
Once you choose what deliverables you want to pursue first, you have started with the functional requirement gathering. All you need to do is prepare the set of questionnaires and get into meetings with the business users (mostly the ones who are currently preparing those reports, or any business user who has given the requirement) to get a detailed understanding of the requirements, from the data sources to logics to final interactive visualizations.
You should also try to get information on security aspects from the business users, such as who should see what kind of data. Although this requirement can be taken up later, it is important to have a discussion with business users so that they can start thinking about it too.
While doing the functional requirement gathering, you are likely to face a tricky situation. The requirements can be of two types: requirements which are known to the business and requirements which are unknown to the business. Known requirements are the ones for which business users know what output they want, what the logic that needs to be applied is, and what the data sources are. This situation can be handled easily because the idea of requirements is clear. The difficulty starts when the requirements are not clear, that is, unknown requirements. Unknown requirements are the ones which the users are unable to clearly express and can not be documented. Most of the time, business users are unaware of the capabilities of the business intelligence tools. On seeing a small demo of the tool, and after looking at the functionality and its operations, they tend to get excited about it and they start thinking about all the possible sets of requirements.
Thus, it may become a little complicated for a consultant to understand them and think about the feasibility of those requirements. To understand unknown requirements, the consultants need to put themselves in the business users’ shoes and think from their perspectives, and visualize the same thing as the business users. To do this, the consultants need to have thorough knowledge of the business, along with the working model.