All, I work for a small non-profit and have been doing BA-esq work for some time. Leadership has no agreed to send me to some in-person trainings to hone my skills and work towards certification. In the mean time, my supervisor has requested that we read a book on requirements gathering together since this is a critical and timely for a number of our projects over the next year.
I'm wondering if anyone here knows of any authors or books that might be useful for us. Sorting through some of the search results on Amazon, I've found a range of books that seem slightly useless, all the way up to the Mastering the Requirements Process (Suzanne Robertson and James Robertson). Can anyone vouch for the awesome reviews that book has gotten?
Thanks in advance!
Alex,
Since you are working in a smaller, less structured environment you should read up on Agile methodologies. But remember that business analysis is about doing what is needed and what makes sense. There are lots of different skills and methods that you can learn but if you try to follow any process too rigidly you will do yourself a disservice.
Regardless of the project, understand the information you are dealing with. A diagram such as an Entity Model can assist with this. Other terms for this type of model are Business Entity Model, Fact Model, Logical Data Dictionary, and Logical Data Diagram.
Understand the functions and features required of an application. User Stories are a light-weight method for identifying and capturing this type of information (this is part of Agile, but is also similar to more traditional Use Cases).
If you work more with process improvement, read up on UML Activity Diagrams, BPMN, and Decision Models.
Chris
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