Following on from my post about SWOT, how do you exploit this analysis to come up with the requirements you’ve identified with your web content management system? Here’s a rapid approach:

1. Distribute your SWOT analysis to your stakeholders and set up workshops involving between three and five participants in each.
2. You’ll need a large whiteboard. Each workshop shouldn’t need more than 30 minutes: 5 minutes to introduce the activity, 15 minutes to run it and 10 minutes to recap.
3. Draw a horizontal line in the centre of the whiteboard. To the left of the line write a one or two-word phrase that describes the objective or result you’re trying to achieve: for example, “improved WCM”.
4. Take the key areas identified as weaknesses, opportunities and threats and draw them as spokes coming off the horizontal line: e.g. content, performance, usability, competitor offerings.
5. Now work with your participants to identify the subjects you need to tackle in order to address the issues identified in the SWOT. Ideas should follow on from the categories you’re suggesting: e.g. competitors are offering RSS feeds, email subscription, personalised news, etc. What else can you offer that your competitor doesn’t currently provide?
6. The idea is to get as many ideas as possible around the themes you’ve identified. At this stage, it’s about quantity not quality. Keeping forking new lines off the themes as you go along, so eventually you end up with ideas that are four or five levels off the main horizontal line.

You’ll end up with something like this, although hopefully more detailed. Click on the image to view the full-size diagram.

Since all the ideas have been made with reference to the original weaknesses, opportunities and threats, they should all be in line with real issues that your SWOT has identified.

You’ll get a feel for the level of detail as you go along, but try not to get too bogged down in any one area: keep the ideas moving along.

At the end of the exercise, you should end up with a skeleton of ideas that looks something like a fishbone. Draw a fish around it to make it look like one if that helps!

What the fishbone will help you do is to drive out requirements that you may not have considered previously. The higher-level ideas should stimulate the more granular issues and focus your stakeholders on the central issues identified in the SWOT, rather than simply bringing their own agenda to the table.

What the fish won’t tell you whether those requirements are feasible or valuable, so the next step we’ll look at is prioritisation.