Designing & Facilitating JAD Workshops

What is a JAD Workshop?

JAD (Joint Application Development) sessions are structured meetings of business and systems representatives for the purpose of defining requirements and deciding other aspects of proposed systems. Using a structured approach, visual aids, and language that is very much the customers', JAD Workshops extract high-quality requirements specifications in a compressed time frame. The participants are focused, the process is facilitated, and the result is greatly enhanced understanding for all those involved.

JAD Workshops significantly reduce your project scope, decrease your timeframe, and result in measurable overall savings. This project management training course gives you hands-on experience planning and conducting JAD Workshops: Learn powerful techniques to quickly mine the collective knowledge of your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and get the tools to put these elicitation methods to work immediately for functional, non-functional requirements as well as use cases and Agile/Scrum user story workshops.

Capers Jones, Chief Scientist Emeritus of Artemis Management Systems and Software Productivity Research, has studied JAD Workshops. He concluded that such workshops:

• Reduce scope creep from 80% to 10%
• Increase delivery speed of early phases by 30-40%
• Increase function points by 40-85%
• Result in 5% to 15% overall savings in time and effort for entire project

*Please note, if you are taking this class as part of the St. Louis University Certificate requirements, there is a $500 fee to claim your certificate once you have completed ALL requirements.