THE GOAL
Jessica (by Workshop IT) is an AI Requirements Assistant which automates the manual effort of gathering your initial requirements, ensuring every stakeholder is heard without the problems that we have come to accept as being a part of the process.
THE PROBLEM
You are ready for your project’s requirement gathering discovery workshop. However, one of the “must-have” attendees is not available until next week and won’t send a delegate.
Two others said they were free, but their calendars are always blocked-out.
Some stakeholders try to use your project as a vehicle to push their own agenda with unrelated scope.
If you are lucky, a simple reiteration of scope will keep them happy.
Other times, you will need to take an action to discuss offline.
The stakeholder who can make or break the requirements? They got called away for a Production issue 5 minutes before the workshop.
They come back later. But they are multi-tasking with an urgent email.
They are still giving you their full attention though, right?
It can start as a simple mention of a requirement. The solution of how to implement it is unknown.
It can be covered in a seperate solution design session but some of the more technically inclined stakeholders start bouncing off each other – going deeper and deeper into the specifics.
Your project has a lot of visibility and everyone wants to be involved. One attendee forced an invite and now realises they don’t actually have much to add.
So they decide to deploy their favourite rhetorical questions, such as “What problem are we really trying to solve here?”
You can write it in the invite as being out of scope.
You can put it on the whiteboard, under the “out of scope” section.
Whatever you do, it doesn’t matter. Someone will always ask about it.
Someone else will arrive late and ask the same thing again.
HOW IT WORKS
One of the Senior Managers insists on getting an invite to your workshop and is being vocal elsewhere about the project’s lack of progress.
He needs to be involved. But he is not available for two weeks and will spend the session distracted, with one eye on his phone.
He receives an invite to use Jessica and gives requirements in his own time.
The workshop goes ahead without him and you have a smaller session with him when he is available the following week, to play back the workshop outcome. Which already includes his inputs.
Your key SME – the person who works with real customers every day – knows the impacted process back-to-front, but is only allowed to spare one hour for your workshop.
With other attendees involved, there is not enough time to hear all of their valuable information.
She gives requirements to Jessica in advance of the workshop. You review the output and identify which points to cover more in the workshop, versus those which don’t need to be discussed at all.
You also see she mentioned a specific template that may be useful for the group, so you ask her to bring it to the workshop with her.
Her manager heard about your project at a town hall and decided that one of their team needs to attend your workshop.
The invite was forwarded before you even knew.
This stakeholder only has one requirement to add and your workshop is taking time away from what she should really be doing
She gives the requirement to Jessica, gains additional context about your project and realises that it is too early to be involved.
She is comfortable not attending your workshop and instead opts to receive the outputs offline, where she can see the requirement is included
OUTPUTS
Jessica examines the interviews in bulk and does the heavy lifting for you:
BENEFITS
Spend less time discussing the ‘easy’ requirements in your workshop.
Mention briefly and move on.
Know in advance who is in disagreement. And know which topics require additional data points to solve.
Take steps to investigate further before you meet.
Start those follow-up investigations in advance of your workshop. Not after.
Attendees who are satisfied they have covered everything in their interviews can choose to not attend the actual workshop.
Requirements collated by Jessica are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-Bound).
Export them in formal language ready for use elsewhere.
Jessica asks clarifying questions to find out the motivations behind requirements.
No more relying on error-prone MS Teams meeting transcriptions. See them exactly as they were typed and find them when you need them.
Of stakeholders opted-out of physical workshops after using Jessica
Reduction in billable time spent on requirement collation
No. Jessica is an AI requirements assistant by Workshop IT designed to remove friction, not replace human interaction. It handles the “easy” items, so you can focus on the complex 20% that needs human intuition.
Surveys often yield ambiguous or out-of-scope answers. Our AI requirements assistant clarifies the respondent’s understanding in real-time to ensure data is specific and actionable.
CoPilot transcribes what happened. Jessica captures what should happen before the meeting even starts.
Workshop IT is a software development company dedicated to engineering practical, efficient digital tools that simplify everyday business operations.
Jessica is the flagship, AI-powered requirements assistant developed and owned by Workshop IT. While Jessica is currently our core offering focused on project discovery, Workshop IT plans to launch additional software solutions under our brand umbrella in the future.
Workshop IT is a broader software innovation house. While Jessica is entirely focused on streamlining the workshop and requirements-gathering phase of project delivery, our long-term roadmap includes building other software to solve different business bottlenecks.