Best Practices for User Report Creation Requests

[devks321]

Hi all,

I'm curious if anyone has any insight on how to improve the quality of report requests from users. I receive a lot of requests that are vague, unclear, etc. I'm trying to improve the process and I was wondering if anyone has an idea of how to nudge more info out of the requester. Just some potential points of discussion:

How do users request reports?
Do you utilize any questions/forms/guides to get more detailed requests from the users?
Any go to follow up questions to nail down what they want?

[cognostechie]

I can tell from my experience that if you ask them questions, they would look at you as if you don't know how to do your job ! The best way, in my opinion, is to make a BRD (Business Requirements Document) and ask them to fill it up. That document would contain sections like parameters required, data itms required, mockup screenshot of what the report should look like, any drill downs/drill thrus required etc.

Once we implemented this system in IT that whenever anybody needs anything , whether a report, dashboard, cube or whatever, they have to fill up the BRD,  things were lot more defined and it reduced the back-and-forth modifications to the reports thereby saving lot of time. Just tell them that this is the system, that way they would have to provide the details.