The first step in any problem analysis is to make sure that all parties involved agree on what the problem is that needs to be solved—or opportunity that will be realized—by the system.  In order to help avoid misunderstandings, it is important to agree on common terminology which will be used throughout the project. Starting early in the lifecycle, you should define your project terms in a Glossary which will be maintained throughout the life of the project (see Capture a Common Vocabulary).

In order to fully understand the problem(s) that need to be addressed, it is very important to know who the stakeholders are in the conceptual vision for the project. These key stakeholders should be involved in gathering the set of features to be considered, which might be gathered in a Requirements Workshop. The features can then be assigned attributes such as rationale, relative value or priority, source of request and so on, so that dependencies and work plans can begin to be managed.

The primary artifact in which you capture the information gained from your problem analysis is the Vision, which identifies the high-level user or customer view of the system to be built (see Develop Vision). In the vision, initial high-level requirements identify the key features it is desired that the appropriate solution will provide. These are typically expressed as a set of high-level features the system might possess in order to solve the most critical problems.  

To determine the initial scope for your project, the boundaries of the system must be agreed upon.  The System Analyst identifies users and systems which will interact with the system being developed.  The users of the system can be represented by Actors in the Use-Case Model (see Find Actors and Use Cases).

The Requirements Management Plan is used to provide guidance on the requirements artifacts that you should develop, the types of requirements that should be managed for the project, the Requirements Attributes that should be collected and the approach to requirements traceability that will be used in managing the product requirements.  It is important to develop this plan up front (see Develop Requirements Management Plan).

The project members involved in analyzing the problem should be efficient facilitators and have experience in techniques for finding the problem behind the problem. Of course, familiarity with the targeted technology is desirable, but it is not essential. Active involvement from various stakeholders in the project is required.