This video focuses on a foundational challenge that every business analyst and business systems analyst faces: how to move beyond superficial engagement with subject matter experts and get to the deeper, more actionable requirements that actually drive improvement.

The session introduces five essential underlying questions - not a literal script of five things to ask, but a disciplined thought process that shapes how a professional analyst engages stakeholders. Together, these questions provide the foundation for deeply effective requirements elicitation across both incremental and transformational change initiatives.

The Core Problem: Superficial Analysis Produces Superficial Requirements

Getting requirements right is hard. Business requirements, business system requirements - surfacing them accurately and completely is one of the most difficult things a business analyst does. And one of the most common failure modes is analysis that stays too shallow.

When an analyst asks superficial questions, they get superficial answers. They walk away with a bullet list of wishes and gripes - things people said they wanted — rather than a genuine understanding of the underlying rules, workflows, value drivers, and constraints that shape what the business actually needs. The result is requirements that are technically documented but practically incomplete, and deliverables that miss the mark.

The goal is deep engagement: going beyond what stakeholders volunteer to surface the requirements that will truly move the organization forward.

Context for the Five Questions

Before getting to the questions themselves, it helps to establish the frame of reference they operate within.

Effectiveness and Efficiency - Why They Are Different

These two words are often used interchangeably, but they are distinct concepts and the distinction matters.

Effectiveness is about creating customer value. It encompasses the quality of outputs, timeliness, service levels, and the overall customer experience. Effectiveness asks: what are the things we can change in our business processes and the systems that support them to create better outcomes for customers?

Efficiency is about delivering effectiveness in the most economical way possible. Once service levels are established - the standards for quality, timeliness, and customer experience - efficiency asks: how can we reduce the cost of meeting those standards without lowering them? Efficiency and cost reduction are related but not the same. Cost reduction means accepting a lower level of effectiveness to reduce cost. Efficiency means maintaining effectiveness at a lower cost. Both are valid objectives, but they are different levers.

Business Requirements vs. Business System Requirements

A business requirement is anything the organization needs to do as part of its operations. A business system requirement is a business requirement that will be supported through information technology or application software.

A useful illustration: consider two restaurants - a large national chain and a small independent Italian restaurant with ten tables. Both have the same underlying business requirements: take reservations, seat customers, assign servers, take orders, prepare and serve food, generate a check, process payment. Those are universal business requirements for any restaurant operation.

But the solution to the same requirement can look very different. The small independent might handle reservations with a hand-written log - a low-tech, no-tech solution that is entirely appropriate for their scale and economics. The national chain might implement an enterprise reservation management platform integrated with online booking services. Same business requirement, very different business system requirements. Understanding this distinction is foundational to scoping analysis work correctly.

Incremental Change vs. Transformational Change

Business analysis work falls into two broad categories, and it is important to approach them differently.

Incremental change is business as usual - improving existing processes, adding functionality to existing systems, updating policies and procedures. These are the things that keep the wheels on. They matter enormously, and most organizations are doing incremental improvement continuously.

Transformational change is driven by strategic initiatives - fundamentally new ways of engaging customers, new product lines, new organizational models, new business capabilities. These are the changes that move the needle. They require more sophisticated analysis and a longer strategic horizon, but they are what allows an organization to grow and prosper in the long run.

Both types of change are important. The five questions address both - but they do so from different angles.

Professional Analyst vs. Order Taker

The level of engagement the analyst brings to these questions determines whether the organization gets genuine requirements or just a list of requests. Think of it as the difference between fast food and fine dining.

At a fast-food restaurant, the person taking the order is doing exactly that - taking an order. The interaction is transactional and superficial. What do you want? What size? Can I supersize it? Nothing wrong with that in the right context. But it is a set of hands getting input into a system, not a professional doing analysis.

At a fine dining restaurant, the server brings knowledge, judgment, and genuine engagement to the table. They understand the menu deeply. They ask thoughtful questions, offer suggestions, make connections between what the guest is looking for and what the kitchen can deliver. That's a professional - someone who adds real value through the quality of the engagement itself.

The five questions that follow are really about elevating the conversation with subject matter experts from fast food to fine dining.

The Five Essential Business Analysis Questions

These are not five literal questions to read off a list. They are five underlying lines of inquiry - five dimensions of engagement - that a professional analyst works through to deeply understand the current state, identify what should change, and surface what the organization needs to move forward.

Question 1: What Are You Currently Doing?

The first question establishes the baseline. Before anything can be improved, eliminated, or reimagined, the analyst has to understand what actually happens today - the current state.

There is sometimes resistance to this in practice. Business analysts will occasionally hear, or even say themselves, "We don't need to spend time on current state - we know what we're doing. Let's focus on the future." That's a mistake. In almost every engagement, the honest answer is that the organization doesn't fully know what it's doing. People have a general understanding, but the detailed reality of how work actually flows - the steps, the decision points, the hand-offs, the exceptions - is rarely as well understood as assumed. Deep current state analysis is how that understanding gets established.

The current state baseline also serves as the launching point for everything that follows. Without it, the remaining four questions have no foundation.

Question 2: What Are You Currently Doing That You Don't Need to Be Doing?

With the current state established, the second question turns immediately to elimination: of everything we are currently doing, what should we stop doing?

This is one of the most practically valuable questions in the entire framework. In virtually every organization, there are work activities, procedures, and processes that exist simply because they have always existed - policies that were created ten or fifteen years ago and are no longer relevant, procedures that were put in place for reasons nobody can quite remember, steps that don't add any value in the current environment. Subject matter experts often know exactly what these are and can list them readily when asked directly.

The analyst's role here is not just to capture the list. It is to understand each item, build the case for eliminating it, and help move that case up the line. Most subject matter experts cannot unilaterally decide to stop doing something, even something obviously unnecessary. It typically requires a first-level supervisor or manager to authorize the change - and often that manager wasn't aware the work was being done at all. Getting to that conversation, and enabling that decision, is part of the analyst's job. Stopping the madness before it gets automated is far less expensive than automating unnecessary work and then having to undo it.

This question is primarily about incremental improvement: leaning out the current process before building on it.

Question 3: What Are You Currently Doing That You Need to Continue - but Improve?

After the baseline is established in Question 1 and the unnecessary work is identified for elimination in Question 2, Question 3 focuses on what remains: the activities and processes that need to continue, but that should be done better.

This is the core of incremental improvement work. Given everything the organization legitimately needs to do, what can be done more effectively — at a higher level of quality, timeliness, or customer experience? What can be done more efficiently - at lower cost while maintaining those effectiveness levels? And what business process changes, policy changes, or system functionality changes would enable those improvements?

The lens here is still the existing process - not a new operating model, but an improved version of the current one.

Question 4: What Are You Not Doing That You Know You Should Be Doing - but Can't?

Question 4 marks a turn toward forward-facing analysis. This question asks subject matter experts to look beyond the current state and surface the things they know the organization needs to do - things that would clearly add value - but that they are currently prevented from doing.

The constraints are usually one of a few types: missing functionality in the supporting systems, business policies or procedures that haven't been updated, resource or capacity limitations, or organizational barriers. Subject matter experts almost always have a list of these. They know what they can't do. They know what's holding them back.

The analyst's job is to elicit that list, understand the value each item would create, and frame the conversation around what would need to change — in process, policy, or technology - to make it possible.

This question can surface both incremental and transformational opportunities. Some items on the list are relatively straightforward improvements to existing capabilities. Others point toward fundamentally new ways of operating or engaging customers - things that would move the needle for the organization rather than just optimize the current model.

Question 5: What Are You Not Doing That You Don't Know You Need to Be Doing?

The fifth question reaches into what can be called the "unknown unknowns" - the things the organization needs to be doing that it hasn't yet identified, but that would create significant value if it knew to do them.

By definition, subject matter experts cannot generate this list on their own. They can only surface what they know. Answering Question 5 requires the analyst to look outside the organization: industry benchmarking, best practice research, competitive analysis, emerging technology and process capabilities, and adjacent industries that have solved similar problems in new ways.

This is typically where transformational opportunities live. It might be a capability that competitors are beginning to build and the organization needs to get ahead of. It might be a blue ocean opportunity - something nobody in the industry is doing yet, but that a careful look at customer needs and market dynamics suggests is coming. It might be an emerging technology application that changes what's operationally possible.

Question 5 demands the most from the analyst in terms of domain knowledge, external research, and strategic thinking. But it is also where some of the highest-value insights come from.

Putting the Five Questions Together

The five questions build on each other in a logical sequence:

1. What are we currently doing? - Establish the baseline.
2. What are we doing that we should stop? - Eliminate what doesn't add value.
3. What are we doing that we need to improve? - Optimize what remains.
4. What should we be doing but can't? - Surface known gaps and constraints.
5. What should we be doing that we don't yet know? - Identify unknown opportunities through external research.

Questions 1 through 3 are primarily oriented toward the current state and incremental improvement. Questions 4 and 5 are forward-facing and increasingly transformational.

Used together, these five lines of inquiry give the analyst the framework to deeply engage subject matter experts across the full range of business analysis work - from routine process improvement to strategic transformation.

The Quality of the Conversation

The real message underneath the five questions is about the quality of the conversation with subject matter experts.

A superficial conversation produces wishes and gripes. A deep one produces actionable requirements - requirements that are understood well enough to be implemented, validated against what the business actually needs, and traceable back to the effectiveness and efficiency objectives that motivated the work in the first place.

The questions to ask when assessing your own organization's business analysis practice:

• Are our business processes and supporting systems really keeping pace with the demands of operational effectiveness, efficiency, and strategic change?
• Do our analysts have the critical thinking skills to rapidly and deeply engage subject matter experts, surface complex requirements, and articulate them clearly?
• Are we producing requirements that are complete and validated - or are we producing bullet lists that leave too much to interpretation?

The consequences of getting this wrong show up in project deliverables that miss the business need, in stakeholder frustration, and in the cumulative cost of rework and misaligned systems. The benefits of getting it right - requirements that are accurate, complete, and actionable - compound over time into genuine competitive advantage.

Learn More

Inteq Group offers a full suite of training programs and management consulting services in business systems analysis, business process management, business process reengineering, digital transformation, agentic AI, and organizational change management.

To explore Inteq's training course catalog or consulting services, visit inteqgroup.com.