Don't forget, that this is an iterative process. You may develop some high level scenarios and then refine them as you are learning more.
Scenarios are stories about the personas you just created. These stories describes how each personas would complete their jobs. There is a lot involved in creating scenarios. The things to consider are:
- Critical task or situation
- User's desired outcome for the task
- Task flow- how the user goes through the task
- Time interval
- features or functionality that the user will need or will be using
- Exceptions - the rare events and their frequencies
Going through this exercise will help you with identifying some desired features (this is not the same as system requirements). Build scenarios for each persona until you have covered all the functionality of your product. If you uncover other functionalities during this exercise, then you have some elements of your gap analysis between what is and what is desired. During this exercise however avoid talking about the system. Don't say or write things like: "Jane selects her courses from the combo list and then clicks the submit button". At this point your are focusing on what Jane does if the system didn't exist or wasn't build the way it is. The best way to correct this sentence would be: "Jane selects all her desired courses and submits this information to the admistration department"
Now, to solidify your scenarios, you will have to have some contact with your users. You can't just use creativity for everything. You must validate what you just wrote or assumed about the users, their personas and their scenarios.
There are many templates out there depending on your methodology. Make sure you understand how to build your scenario and don't get caught in analysis paralysis as Barbara Carkenord from B2TTraining advise in her blog: We NEED Project Managers!
