I keep seeing in BA skill descriptions or in specific articles that ‘negotiation skills’ are a necessity for Business Analysts. I just don’t see it myself. Negotiation is a difficult activity for many people, and I see this trend as an attempt to offload negotiation to other people… like Business Analysts. Why do I feel this way? As an activ...

“Who is the project manger?” “Who is the developer?” “What is a business analyst?” I received a business card at an Agile event one time, and I wish I could find the card or remember the gentleman’s name to give proper credit, but he listed his title as Agile Evangelist. If the role of business analyst is new to your company, and sometimes even if ...

Many large organizations have adopted a gated approach to reduce new product development (NPD) risk. One of the key features of such an approach is a set of “go/no-go” decision gates which, in principle, ensures that each project remains aligned with its original strategic intent and its value remains high enough to justify its continuation to the ...

Developing requirements is a process with many moving parts. It involves aligning multiple stakeholders from different areas within an organization to determine what must be developed to fulfill a business need.  Because it is a process, there are a number of factors that can cause the process to break down and lead to the development of fault...

Don’t you love clichés? I am sure your immediate thought when you read the title of this post was “Yet another blog telling me I need to listen more”. You’re probably right about half of it, you probably do need to listen more. We all need to listen more. But this thought doesn’t deal with the art of listening; ...

Would you like to be perceived as effective? Want to succeed? Make sure you follow up.   As a BA you are involved in several initiatives at different stages of development.  What separates an average professional from an exceptional one is following up on tasks assigned to others on your projects. I'm too busy,...

Over last 6 years, I have come across more than hundreds of analysts and have conducted almost equal number of interviews. Over this time, I have developed a knack of differentiating best analysts from good and good analysts from bad. If you face this challenge regularly, this post might help you.   So how do you differentiate between g...

In the BABOK, an entire section is dedicated to stakeholder analysis (version 2.0 section 2.2). The first element of stakeholder analysis as defined in the BABOK is the identification of stakeholders. It stands to reason therefore that if we as business analysts fail at the building block of stakeholder identification, then we are putting the proce...

You might think I am crazy for wondering if Indiana Jones might be a good business analyst. Even though Indiana Jones is portrayed in the movies as a treasure hunter, he was really an archaeologist first. So what skills do archaeology and business analysis have in common? I don’t think I would have been able to draw a parallel betwee...

In my previous posts I outlined how I was able to succeed being the first and only BA at a company and the importance of establishing trust between you and the stakeholders.   So you're the first BA at a company.   All are looking at you and thinking what can this person do for me? Good question.   What can you do f...