Angie Perris, CBAP, 
Angie Perris, vice president of client solutions, B2T Training, has over 25 years experience in business analysis. She possesses an MBA from the Florida Institute of Technology, recently earned her CBAP™ from the IIBA™, and maintains her PMP® certification from PMI®. Angie’s areas of expertise include business analysis, project management, software and business methodologies, facilitation, iterative development, business process reengineering, continuous improvement, and CMM. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and is a contributing author to the bridge—B2T Training’s business analysis magazine.
June 4, 2007 – 9:00 am – Recently MARTA, Atlanta’s mass transit system, installed a fancy new fare system which takes “smart” cards instead of tokens. Things were a little bumpy at first but overall the new system seemed to be working well until the unexpected happened. Yesterday an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution talked about how MARTA took a heavy economic [...]
April 16, 2007 – 9:00 am – As mentioned in last week's "Getting Started Part I", I start each project by making notes about what I already know about the project. These are some questions I like to answer about each project to document what I know before I can produce my detailed requirements plan. Has there been a Project Manager assigned? Do [...]
April 9, 2007 – 9:00 am – What should you do first? Would you define your requirements scope before you start to identify and analyze your stakeholders or vice versa? Would you receive the same answer if you asked 10 Business Analysts? I would bet not. Many might answer that they identify scope first before they can identify requirements stakeholders. Others would start [...]
January 22, 2007 – 9:00 am – Continued from BA Considerations when Working with Global Teams – Part 1 1) Selecting and using common (familiar) processes, tools, templates, techniques and standards. We should try to select development processes, tools, techniques and templates for which the team has experience. For the BA the key deliverable is the requirements package. Using a standard template for [...]
January 13, 2007 – 1:06 pm – Working with remote stakeholders without face-to-face contact is never easy. If we cannot walk down the hall to ask a question or to look over someone’s shoulder to sneak a peek at their progress – we gain little insight into the detailed work and sometimes we don’t know until too late that we are off [...]
October 16, 2006 – 9:00 am – I am not sure why so many people seem heated with the mention of agile development. Most of the concepts of agile development are not new. Anyone who has worked on any Rapid Development (RAD) projects in the past 10-plus years has followed many of the agile principles. The RAD process is considered the forerunner [...]
September 4, 2006 – 9:00 am – As a Business Analyst we are dependent on our communication skills and our experience with handy analysis techniques to elicit excellent requirements. A successful interaction with our business and IT stakeholders involves choosing the right technique to fit the project, the problem, and the stakeholders. The choice will definitely influence a facilitated session outcome, the [...]
June 26, 2006 – 9:10 am – I recently read an article written by one of my favorite gurus, Neal Whitten, entitled Do You Really Get Your Job? Neil is very big on accountability. He writes an article that reminds us to examine our jobs and roles and to think about whether we are performing in the best way possible or are [...]
May 22, 2006 – 8:07 am – We are often asked by Business Analysts, "How do I know when requirements are complete?" I was intrigued with one such person's attempt to answer this question for his Master's thesis using a Requirements Completeness Model (see Figure 1, Alexander, 1990). Alexander elegantly represents in his quadrant model what we already know, that business analysis [...]