It’s that time of year, where our thoughts turn to the holidays…the holiday parties, the shopping, the lights, visiting with family!  For many organizations, the end of the year tends to be quiet on the IT front, for no organization wants to risk introducing problems into their production environment at year end.  So as I look back at th...

You have achieved your short term BA goals. You want to expand your horizons and see what else is out there and how you can progress in your career and gain knowledge and keep your career up-to-date as well. What are some of the possibilities out there that won't force you to re-learn something new from scratch? Some possibilities for career and kn...

One of the more controversial techniques fostered by some in the agile community is ‘Pair Programming’. It is a practice that originates from Extreme Programming, a specific Agile process pioneered by Kent Beck. It is controversial, particularly for larger corporates because it seeks to adjust human behaviour patterns. In Pair Programming, develop...

A lot of our clients bring us in to fix their requirements issues. Based on the literature a lot of what you see about requirements is geared towards making sure that you write a requirement in the correct way – measurable, testable, traceable and atomic.  Our experience with many Fortune 500 companies leads to a different issue being the most...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...