Community Blog for Business Analysts

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Being a relatively new Requirements Analyst/ Business Analyst ( BA) and being new to the industry, I have been blessed with the opportunity to have mentors. Receiving direction from more experienced BA’s has definitely helped me find areas that I can improve on, while at the same time, finding my strengths and improving those too. Yet there stil...

Posted by: Seilevel

» IT Black Ops

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I’ve worked on at least one project now and heard of several others where a super-secret development team works in parallel to solve the same business problem as the “official” IT project team. A coworker of mine coined the term “IT Black Ops” to refer to these sorts of projects where the business, either out of frustration, arrogance, or ignorance...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Lessons for a Good Hair Cut

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Last year, I wrote about my Lessons from a Bad Haircut. I’m please to say I finally have a lesson from a good haircut. How did I finally get a good haircut? It was what the stylist did after I explained what I wanted. She drew a quick sketch. It took about 15 seconds. And, with that sketch, I was able to say “No, that’s not what I want.” 60 ...

Posted by: Seilevel

» What do you do when the client isn’t focused on the business outcome?

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One of the values that we bring is that we can help our clients to decide what scope to cut by providing them with a framework that links quantifiable business objectives to specific features. We create an objective chain to do this and it helps to spotlight features that don’t feed into the core business purpose. Typically our stakeholders are abl...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Visual Modeling – Stopping IT Failure at the Root of the Cause

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I came across this slideshow from CIO Insight a few weeks ago. The aggressive-looking deck attempts to explain why IT projects fail. I’m always a bit weary of headlines that seem this simplistic, but who knows – maybe they thought up some new ways to blow a project that millions of us hadn’t already avoided, accomplished, or observed. Better yet, w...

Posted by: Eric Peters

» The Mendix Community Fully Embraces Open Source

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The idea of open source information gathering has been utilized in the scientific community for centuries. It is no secret that sharing information created by communities of experts provides the most productive basis for advancement, regardless of subject matter or field of study. Business engineers developing on the Mendix platform utilize our own...

Posted by: Eric Peters

» It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye: Tips for Getting Closure on Your Project

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Sometimes projects are like villains in horror movies: they just won’t die. Even when you’ve doused them in gasoline, set them on fire, then dumped them in a river, they just keep coming back. A project’s extension beyond its natural or expected life is not good for the project as a whole (even though it might help keep you busy). Projects are expe...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Top 10 User Acceptance Testing Preparation Tips

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If you are a Product Manager or Business Analyst in charge of managing users through User Acceptance Testing (UAT), here are the top 10 things to do to prepare: Formal scripts – prepare formal scripts for the business users to run. If you can re-use any of QA’s scripts, all the better. At a minimum, use your use cases to build test scripts. ...

Posted by: Seilevel

» RML® Model 4 – Data Dictionary

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When creating a data dictionary, it is critical not to design with it. You should not be attempting to create a database nor should you be showing the relationships of data. This will be a detailed description of the data involved in your project. It will also be one of the largest morale draining approval processes you can have f...

Posted by: Seilevel

» 5 Steps to Improving your Career as a BA

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The community of business analysts in the United States and abroad is taking notice of their impact on the world economy. Not long ago, the idea of a business analyst was new – sitting on the border of technology and business, sharing lunch with both ‘geeks’ and ‘suits,’ and creating value with only the uncanny ability to collaborate between these ...

Posted by: Eric Peters

» Building Credibility With Your Team

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As consultants and product managers, it is important that we quickly build and maintain credibility with our team so that we can work productively and effectively. If you are unable to join the team dynamics, the work that we provide will be met with apathy or even outright hostility. I’ve learned a few tips to help...

Posted by: Seilevel

» How many Business Analysts do I need on my project?

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At the beginning of almost every project (and even sometimes midway through them) we are asked to create a requirements plan and estimate the time required on tasks and the number of BAs necessary to execute it. In a later post I’ll talk about the actual plan items, but we do have a rule of thumb for how many BAs you need on a project. We have a s...

Posted by: Seilevel

» BA World Sydney - A review

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I went to the Business Analyst World Conference in Melbourne on the 19th and 20th of July. Like last year it was a great event. On day 1 I spent the whole day in one room (introducing speakers.) and got to listen to three very different stories. Matthew Coppola from Perth training outfit Paramount Training gave a talk on Und...

Posted by: Craig Brown

» How do you determine if you have a business rule?

(187 Views) (1 Comments)

On a recent client’s project, we were asked to help in the effort of creating a system to automate much of the current manual processes. In order to capture the requirements this also meant that we were documenting the business rules that were currently being used. When I started the project, I did not have a complete understanding...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Work Harder, Not Smarter

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I am all for great tools and processes that increase efficiency of work, facilitate better accuracy, allow for repeatable results, so on and so forth. But sometimes they simply do not fit. Yes, I just said better is not always good. Why? Spending time trying to improve tools or processes on short turnaround projects or tasks is us...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Is Your Product Knowldege an Asset or Liability?

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There was recently an interesting post by John Mansour on the Austin PMM Forum (registration required) discussing whether Product Knowledge was an Asset or Liability to product managers. The author makes several claims about how product knowledge is a liability: “In a nutshell, the more product knowledge you have, the less product management yo...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Planning for Uncertainty

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The probability that a project will succeed is different for different cost and time targets. There isn't a single right answer to "How long will it take?" or "How much will it cost?" There are a whole bunch of answers, each with its own probability of being right. The conventional techniques for planning projects only give us one answer—and it's ...

Posted by: Marc Thibault

» Creating Accurate Time Estimates

(838 Views) (3 Comments)

By Landerson I recently joined a new project where I will be working as the person responsible for the developing and creating the requirements and documentation on a major development effort. As the person on the hook for a significant portion of work, I need to provide accurate time estimates for my portions of the project. I was concerned about...

Posted by: Seilevel

» “So, what do you do for a living?”: A BA/Product Manager’s guide to surviving cocktail parties

(1212 Views) (5 Comments)

By Jhulgan I used to dread hearing the question, “So what do you do for a living?” This was often usually asked by a family member or other acquaintances not familiar with the software development lifecycle, IT, or business processes in general. For business analysts, product managers, and other software requirements types, it’s diffic...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Academia World vs. Industry World

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I am a firm believer in the value of a business analysts and requirements engineering. I am an new Assistant Professor and I have been conducting research in the field for over 6 years now and I can safely say that there is a HUGE gap between the academic and practitioner worlds with respect to business analysis and requirements engi...

Posted by: Dr. Mohamed El-Attar

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The Community Blog for Business Analysts

Join the Premier Community for Business Analysts, Business Process Professionals, Systems Analysts, Data Analysts, and more…

The Community Blog for Business Analysts

Join the Premier Community for
Business Analysts, Business Process Professionals,
Systems Analysts, Data Analysts, and more…