The Community Blog for Business Analysts

I was running a meeting with a few stakeholders. I was imploring them to indicate the relative importance of requirements, but was hitting a brick wall; they kept insisting, "They all look the same to me. All requirements are important. They all are must-haves." I tried to reason with them multiple times over. There are just too many requirements...

My youngest daughter was scheduled for her first dentist appointment.  She couldn’t contain her excitement.  She had her stuffed dog, dentist-visiting attire and bright, sparkling smile ready for the event.  She was ready to go.  Little did I realize that not only would my daughter come away with a clean-bill of dental hea...

This is in continuation of my earlier post on Business Requirement. If you have not read that post, I recommend you take a few minutes to study that first before continuing with this post. In this post, let's discuss Stakeholder Requirement. Some people refer to this as User Requirement, but BABOK's nomenclature is Stakeholder Requi...

Yes, yes...you are right. This is an elephant.  Well, no. This post is not about the elephant. The elephant is used only for symbolism.  And you are right...there are a lot of other similar posts out there. This is my take on this topic. It is different from others. So, what does the elephant stand for? T...

"Business Requirement" is a maligned phrase. Different people have different interpretations for what it means. The worst interpretation that I have come across is, “hey, if the requirement comes from a business stakeholder, then it is a business requirement”. Requirement from business is NOT business requirement. For God's sake, every ...

Years ago, I was consulting as a Principal Business Analyst for the second largest company in the world in the money transfer business. One fine morning, I was engrossed in my work when my business stakeholder, (let's call him Tom) arrived at my desk.  Tom: Praveen, I have a change request for you. Well, this is a new business requiremen...

We saw about the problems and the ways of defining a solution to those problems in the last article. Also, I had mentioned that when a problem arises, there is a need for the business to resolve that problem. So, what would be business needs? It again depends on the problems which they face.  By definition, Needs are desires of the project cus...

Now when I am already a successful BA since many years, I would like to share few moments with everyone. During my first months as a business analyst, life was filled with a sort of inner turmoil. Even though I had books on how to write requirements documents, had received individual mentoring on putting together use cases, and had a trus...

Till now whatever we have seen was more from a bank point of view on few of the roles and responsibilities of a business analyst. Let us see on day-today what a business analyst might be doing!!!   Before understanding what business analyst do, let us understand why any business need an analyst. By definition, an analyst is the individual wh...

Now, I am a BA. My role of doing the routine operational work is no more there. Now I am in to the mode of asking questions. So, what are the questions I should be asking? How am I supposed to interpret the answers? How do I build my knowledge on the process based on these answers? How can I contribute to the improvement of the process? These are f...