It can be helpful to go beyond what customers are asking for to understand their underlying needs since that is what we should be addressing. 5 Whys is a commonly used example of a funnel question which can help in both root cause analysis but also getting to true needs.
Kiron Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
I find the 5 whys technique interesting
There are people who do not react much when applying this technique.
Open-ended questions, various types of reformulations may be appropriate as long as they allow us to understand well what customers and / or other stakeholders want Saving Changes...
It can be a very useful approach to decompose requirements, however that approach needs to be done skillfully. I frequently use the technique doing Root Cause Analysis, in which I find solution requirements by breaking down the source of a prior problem.
There are a few negatives that are possible. The person asking can pick questions to steer the answer to what they wanted as an answer, rather than what the customer actually needs. It is also possible get into chicken-or-egg type loops, and to state the questions/answers in a way that the questioning goes off on tangents, and the decomposition generates voluminous non-value-added requirements.
The person asking questions has to focus on critical requirements which drive the value of the project to avoid replacing the customers needs with their own interests and to avoid "going down the rabbit hole" to use an Alice in Wonderland reference. Saving Changes...
