CAPM Practice: Determine how to gather requirements

Elicitation goes beyond asking. Stakeholders often struggle to articulate needs — they may not know what's possible, may state solutions instead of needs, or may have unconscious requirements. Skilled elicitation techniques draw out these deeper, richer requirements.

**Why not A:** Requirements elicitation is fundamentally a collaborative activity that depends on stakeholder involvement. Creating requirements in isolation would produce assumptions rather than validated needs, leading to solutions that miss the mark. The entire purpose of elicitation is to engage stakeholders through structured techniques to uncover their real needs.

**Why not B:** Elicitation is the process of discovering and gathering requirements, not approving them. Requirements approval is a separate activity that occurs after requirements have been elicited, analyzed, and documented. Confusing elicitation with approval conflates two distinct stages of the requirements management lifecycle.

**Why not C:** Simply asking stakeholders what they want is a passive approach that captures only stated, surface-level needs. True elicitation goes much deeper — using techniques like observation, prototyping, document analysis, and workshops to uncover unstated assumptions, implicit needs, and requirements that stakeholders may not even realize they have.