Interviewing SMEs

I like your question and wish I could say every project we had was tied to a business reason. We still see projects come through that bypass the system. That said, we've had to work even harder to set up question lists for such projects. 

One way we break it down is to ask our SMEs to answer one question: "What's the problem?" and from there we focus on what needs to be done to solve the problem. You'll get a lot of answers and many won't relate to your audience or even your course, but it's a good way to get the conversation going.