Meetings and interviews with stakeholders should maintain some type of structure or formality. Even if it is just a quick call, you should have some type of agenda. I know this may sound like overkill, but it will help you to keep the call or meeting on track and, more importantly, help to ensure that you collect the information you need from the call or meeting.

There are some key items that will help determine the design factors, which are explained as follows:

• SLAs: These are a part of a service contract where a service, its availability (uptime and access), and its performance (application response and transaction processing) are defined
• Service Level Objective (SLO): This defines specific objectives that must be achieved as part of the SLA
• RTO: This is the amount of time in which a service must be restored after a disruption or disaster
• RPO: This is the maximum amount of data loss acceptable due to a disruption or disaster
• OLAs: This is an internal agreement that defines relationships between support groups

Do not expect to complete the discovery in a single meeting or interview, especially for a large enterprise project. There will be follow-up questions that may need to be asked, and there will likely be questions that require more research to be answered.

In situations where more research is required, make sure that someone has been assigned with the responsibility to complete the research. Set an expectation on when the research should be completed and the information should be available. You want to avoid the I thought so-and-so was getting that situations and keep the discovery process moving forward.