Facilitated Use Case Workshop

Workshop Overview

Facilitated Use Case Workshop

A hands-on, project-based engagement where an ICON facilitator leads a real project team through developing its own requirements artifacts — vision, use case model, use case specifications, and supplementary specification — while coaching the team.

Applied (Project-Based) Learning

Unlike a lecture course, the workshop applies techniques to the participants' actual project, so the team leaves with both improved skills and real, usable requirements artifacts.

Role of the Facilitator

The facilitator leads requirements-definition sessions, mentors participants in forming proper artifacts, and helps establish requirements and change management processes, tailoring emphasis to the project's needs.

Tailored Focus

The facilitator varies the emphasis to suit the project — spending more time where the team needs it most, whether on vision, modeling, specification writing, or process setup.

Who Should Participate

A single project team — project manager, analysts, users/SMEs, software architect, and UI designers — with optional developers, testers, technical writers, business process experts, and sponsors.

Key Artifacts

Vision Document

A high-level artifact capturing the problem being solved, stakeholders, key features, and goals — establishing the shared context and scope within which detailed requirements are developed.

Use Case Model

The set of actors, use cases, and relationships (plus diagram and text) that defines the system's functional scope and the value it provides to each actor.

Use Case Specifications

Detailed descriptions of each use case — actors, preconditions, postconditions, basic flow, and alternate flows — that the team drafts and refines during the workshop.

Supplementary Specification

A document capturing requirements not expressed in use cases — non-functional requirements, quality attributes, and constraints — often organized with FURPS+.

Artifact Set Cohesion

The vision, use case model, use case specs, and supplementary spec work together: the vision frames scope, the model maps functionality, the specs detail behavior, and the supplement covers qualities and constraints.

Workshop Activities

Client Project Overview

The opening activity where the team shares the project's background, goals, and constraints so the facilitator can tailor the workshop and ground the work in real context.

Establishing Project Scope

Defining what is in and out of the system by identifying actors, primary use cases, and boundaries — creating a shared, bounded understanding before detailing requirements.

Developing Use Cases

Collaboratively identifying actors and goals, drafting basic and alternate flows, and writing specifications — with the facilitator coaching quality and consistency in real time.

Iterative Development Criteria

Defining how requirements will be prioritized and delivered in iterations, connecting use cases to an incremental delivery plan driven by value and risk.

Next Steps

The closing activity that defines how the team will continue — completing artifacts, establishing ongoing requirements and change management, and sustaining the practices learned.

Improving Requirements

Reviewing Existing Artifacts

Examining the team's current requirements documents to assess quality, level, and completeness, then improving them using the techniques practiced in the workshop.

Identifying and Closing Gaps

Systematically finding missing actors, goals, flows, or quality requirements and filling them so the requirement set becomes complete and consistent.

Improving Use Case Writing Skills

Coaching participants to write clearer, better-leveled, design-free use cases by applying and practicing proven techniques on their own material.

Applying Prior Course Techniques

The workshop lets participants apply skills from earlier requirements courses to a live project, cementing learning through real practice with expert feedback.

Process Establishment

Requirements Management Process

A defined approach for eliciting, organizing, baselining, and tracing requirements that the facilitator helps the team establish so good practice continues after the workshop.

Change Management Process

A defined process for proposing, evaluating, approving, and tracing requirement changes, ensuring the team controls scope and change rather than reacting to it.

Establishing Traceability

Setting up links from needs to use cases to design and tests so the team can perform impact analysis and verify coverage as the project evolves.

Baselining Requirements

Agreeing and snapshotting the requirement set at a point in time so subsequent changes are measured and managed against a known reference.

Facilitation Skills

Facilitation

Guiding a group through a process to reach its own outcomes — staying neutral on content while managing participation, conflict, and decisions so the team produces quality artifacts.

Managing Group Dynamics

Encouraging balanced participation, surfacing and resolving disagreement, and keeping diverse stakeholders engaged and productive during collaborative requirements sessions.

Building Shared Understanding

A central benefit of facilitated sessions: bringing stakeholders together to co-create artifacts creates alignment and reduces costly misunderstandings later.

Mentoring in Real Time

The facilitator coaches participants as they work — correcting use-case level, removing design detail, and improving flows — so the team learns by doing on their own project.

Outcomes

Dual Outcome: Skills + Deliverables

Participants leave with stronger requirements skills and with real project artifacts (vision, model, specs, supplement) and processes ready to carry the project forward.

Prerequisite Foundation

Prior exposure to ICON's 'Defining & Managing Requirements with Use Cases' or hands-on use-case experience is highly desirable, though not strictly required.

Tailoring to Project Needs

Because the facilitator adjusts emphasis to the team's situation, two workshops rarely look identical — the agenda follows where the project most needs help.