Barbara Carkenord, CBAP, 
Barbara Carkenord, Co-Founder, Chief Curriculum Strategist, B2T Training, has been involved with business analysis for more than 20 years. In her career Barbara has been as a programmer, systems analyst, Business Analyst, and project manager. She has spoken at industry conferences and written white papers on business analysis. She has detailed knowledge and experience in many structured approaches and methodologies. Barbara’s areas of expertise include business analysis, high-level design, quality assurance, and project management.
June 4, 2008 – 6:04 am – Gap analysis is a well established technique for business analysts working on COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) package implementations. It is amazing that this simple technique can be helpful with so many analysis challenges. Most gap analysis is done in a matrix or table where the analyst can keep track of the business needs in one column and note [...]
April 21, 2008 – 9:00 am – I have found that many BAs cringe when talking about software testing. They don't want to test and don't seem to want to learn the basic testing principles. I fell in love with testing when I learned about the best practices and all of the techniques. When you are testing, your goal is to find problems. What [...]
February 25, 2008 – 10:33 am – Business analysts are rarely allowed enough time to elicit, analyze, and confirm requirements. Why? One reason may be that we don't ask for it. An important BA skill is the ability to accurately estimate the amount of time required to perform analysis work and be able to explain and justify it to project managers and [...]
February 18, 2008 – 9:00 am – I presented a webinar for Catalyze (www.mycatalyze.org) on February 14th entitled Designing a Sure-Fire Stakeholder Strategy. The presentation touched on the importance of business analysis planning, specifically planning for stakeholder communications. We had 150 attendees and I was not able to answer all of the questions that were submitted. I will answer the remaining questions in upcoming [...]
January 14, 2008 – 9:00 am – When I was in South Africa last fall, a systems engineer told me about an organization called INCOSE. I was not familiar with it but he told me that they had many of the same goals as the IIBA so I decided to take a look. Some information from their web site (http://www.incose.org/): The International Council on [...]
January 7, 2008 – 11:02 am – 2008 promises to be a great year for business analysis! We have finally hit our stride – lots of people in our companies are beginning to understand what we do and the value that we bring to the organization. The IIBA has certified over 200 CBAPs in it's first year and is working to make [...]
December 3, 2007 – 9:00 am – I wanted to share a great presentation from the Project World and World Congress for Business Analysts conference in Anaheim this month. Russ Pena from Sun Trust presented their professional development framework. His organization has recognized the importance of the business analyst role and built a career path with 4 capability levels. Each level has [...]
November 19, 2007 – 9:00 am – I attended the Project Summit/BA World in Boston this week. Once again it was great to be with so many individuals who understand the importance of business analysis work. Most of the same challenges that we have been talking about for a couple of years still plague organizations: lack of understanding of the roles of [...]
October 9, 2007 – 10:34 am – Traceability is a necessary component for complete and accurate requirements. Traceability is used in many aspects of requirements development and management. A simple definition is that "tracing requirements" means that we show relationships or links between different requirements components. Examples include: Which data requirements are used in each process? Which business objectives are supported by each business rule? Which [...]
October 1, 2007 – 9:00 am – We are seeing a lot of success with agile projects when an experienced BA is on the team. We have completed two iterations of a project internally using an agile approach and our business users are very happy with the results. They are also happy with the fast turnaround time. Agile is really just about scoping [...]