June 26, 2009 – 1:50 pm –
Over the past few years I have been advocating that business analysis is a distinct profession, separate from project management, separate from development, separate from quality assurance. I believe that eliciting, and analyzing requirements; and making sure they are used to create a good quality solution is a full time job. I also believe that if [...]
June 9, 2009 – 11:40 am –
In an informal survey with our customers we recently found that many business analysts are often working on requirements to enhance COTS applications. ERP and CRM processes have been commoditized for a number of years and have been implemented in many diverse organizations with interesting results. Examples of some well-known COTS packages are SAP, PeopleSoft, [...]
May 13, 2009 – 7:59 am –
When writing the title of this post I started to sing “How low can you go…How low can you go?” I told you that so I am not the only one with that song stuck in my head.
On to the blog post. Yesterday, I had a meeting with the technical lead for the project [...]
April 27, 2009 – 7:46 am –
When I first started attending concerts lighters were all the rage. The lights went down and on certain songs everyone would bust out their Bic lighter to illuminated the room to set a mood. Well, for a number of reasons lighters are not in everyone’s pocket at concerts these days. Do you think that stopped concert [...]
April 14, 2009 – 3:10 pm –
As I hear more and more BAs talking about user stories I feel the need to begin a dialogue on our blog. User stories have been promoted by the iterative and agile software development approaches as a quick way to elicit and document user requirements. Some BAs are being told that user stories are the [...]
March 16, 2009 – 4:51 pm –
I attended the Business Process Innovation Conference in Marietta, GA last week and had the opportunity to hear from some very insightful speakers.
One of the hot topics of conversation revolved around enterprise analysis and how it can add significant value to organizations. Enterprise analysis is work done pre-project to determine the appropriate portfolio path [...]
March 9, 2009 – 8:32 am –
You have been given a user request to add a new field to a screen. You notice that the request is 6 months old. When you call the user to introduce yourself and let her know that you are going to be working on the request she tells you to cancel it! She found a way [...]
March 2, 2009 – 3:42 pm –
I recently hosted an industry luncheon with senior Business Analysts’ and one of the topics of conversation was templates. The question is how helpful are templates and how much are they hurting us?
My take is that templates are helpful to the extent that they provide consistency but become problematic when BA’s can’t see outside their [...]
February 17, 2009 – 2:16 pm –
Many analysts skip the identification of business processes and move right to the Use Cases. Some call these “Business Use Cases” and view them as logical, business requirements. I recommend that both business processes and system Use Cases are important components. They are two different requirement constructs representing two different perspectives with two different purposes.
Business [...]
January 26, 2009 – 7:00 am –
As my wife and I watched our stock and mutual fund investments drop ( I know…we should not be looking at the monthly statements now) we decided we should subscribe to Money magazine. The thought being this is a great time to get some more education in this area. There were many excellent articles in [...]
