August 18, 2010 – 4:47 pm –
Every day more and more BA’s I speak with are faced with the challenge of working with team members and business stakeholders that are geographically dispersed. For today’s post I wanted to share an excerpt from Barbara Carkenord’s book, Seven Steps to Mastering Business Analysis. Below are two topics, time zone differences and nationality and cultural [...]
June 7, 2010 – 2:11 pm –
There is a good article on the Requirements Network Group on Modifications to COTS by Bill Flowers. www.requirementsnetwork.com I’ll be talking about Developing Requirements for Purchased Software (COTS) in Atlanta on July 21st at the SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) chapter meeting. www.atlantaspin.org
These are both important topics for project managers and business analysts. As Bill [...]
May 10, 2010 – 3:16 am –
I will diverge in this week’s blog about agile before writing Agile and the BA – Part 2. In trying to better understand the intention of agile practices, I thought it best to hear directly from the co-founders of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber. The most widely implemented of all the agile processes [...]
April 6, 2010 – 2:03 pm –
One of the fundamental tasks of business analysis is to learn the business. Business models and business requirements are developed by spending time with business experts, observing, asking questions, diagramming and confirming process flows, discovering business rules and data. I am interested in starting a discussion about when the BA performs these tasks.
I was recently [...]
March 31, 2010 – 9:15 am –
Tom Davenport (”Make Better Decisions,” Harvard Business Review, Nov. 2009) states, “In recent years decision makers in both the public and private sectors have made an astounding number of poor calls.” I don’t think you can disagree with that. In her paper, “Senior Business Analysts are Strategic Decision Makers”, Barbara Carkenord makes the case that [...]
March 23, 2010 – 6:31 am –
Agile approaches are becoming more common for software development projects. This blog and several future blogs will discuss concepts important in agile approaches from the perspective of a business analyst. The first concept to be explored is collaboration.
Organizations that are successful implementing agile approaches typically agree to support one main Agile Manifesto principle which is [...]
March 15, 2010 – 1:51 pm –
Requirements.net is offering a new series of podcasts on Application Modernization. Modernizing old software applications is a challenge for any organization which has been in business for several years. With technology constantly changing, our old applications often need a facelift, an upgrade or complete replacement. The number and complexity of software interfaces makes these modernization projects complex analysis [...]
March 8, 2010 – 10:48 am –
Start with the art of the one-on-one encounter; add in strategies for interviewing, maximizing meetings and presentations; then finish off with making the most of social interactions. All together you get How to Wow: Proven Strategies for Presenting Your Ideas, Persuading Your Audience, and Perfecting Your Image, a resource to help you succeed in any [...]
February 20, 2010 – 7:31 pm –
I enjoyed reading a provocative article on BA Times, The Tyranny of Best Practice and Its Effect on Requirements Elicitation, about the evolution and tyranny of best practices. I have always believed that techniques and processes become known as best practices because there has been proven success repeatedly (with verification). I was curious where the author [...]
January 25, 2010 – 9:05 pm –
I was reading an interesting chain of comments on one of the LinkedIn BA group websites about the role of a BA being described using a bridge metaphor.
Someone asked why the BA definition in the latest BABOK v2.0 no longer uses the metaphor of a bridge between Business and IT. Kevin Brennan of the IIBA [...]
