January 13, 2011 – 4:13 pm –
I was thinking just the other day how I love the New Year because it is full of possibilities. I take the opportunity to be introspective and think about the habits, the skills and talents that I have used (and sometimes misused!), my successes and my failings and whether I am still on course with [...]
September 24, 2010 – 3:25 pm –
I attended two presentations this week from two very different speakers on two different topics but heard a common message in both. Cloud computing is on the rise and here to stay!
The first speaker was Lee Spelman, a managing director of JP Morgan Asset Management. Her talk was on the economic outlook and investment strategies. [...]
September 13, 2010 – 10:00 am –
In today’s fast paced environment many projects Business Analysts are assigned to already have a project end date assigned. This means the team needs to work backwards to determine dates for analysis, development, testing, and deployment. Often for BAs the time allotted for analysis is less than ideal. For today’s post I wanted to share an [...]
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 [...]
