Every project, irregardless of size or formal methodology being used has it - The traditionalists call it requirements gathering, the more elegant amongst us call it requirements elicitation, the agile camp calls it story boarding. Seth Godin calls it Thrashing in his new book Linchpin. I like the word Thrashing, because I think it more accurately describes the often chaotic, mostly random, usually unstructured, free-form nature of collecting and documenting requirements. It typically involves a wide group of people that crosses geography, functional departments, and lines of business. Its an inclusive process with lots of opinions.
All really comes down to the same thing - getting to the blueprint of what you are going to do by engaging all the stakeholders early in the process.
The one thing that strikes me as odd about the whole thing is that very smart people are still talking about using physical note cards, or sticky notes, and what not to paper record ideas and notes as part of the Thrashing effort.
I think the better way, at least for salesforce projects, is to use ... (drum rolls please ... ) salesforce Ideas and Chatter to collaborate. You already have an instance turned on for the CRM implementation, it doesn't cost you anything extra, your clients users are already all on the system, and what better way to get your client user groups adopting the platform? The added benefit being that if they use it during your implementation, you'll get pre-trained users by the time your CRM project is finished.
