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...

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...

I've been thinking a lot recently about the value of the BA, and BA recruitment - at all levels.   A common question that comes up is "Do I need to have experience in Industry X/Domain Y to work as a BA in that industry/domain?"   In a nutshell: Is it like that now? Yes. Should it be like that? Probably no...

A “What If” question for business analysts and IT professionals… What if it suddenly became very easy for someone to do both your job and their own, at the same time? If history provides any forecast for the future of IT, we are likely to see some interesting changes in the way human capital is managed – especially for those of us involved in the...

Who owns a project?   “You pay for it, it’s yours.” I am sure I am quoting (or misquoting) someone here, but you get the idea. For an IT project of any size or worth, someone senior enough to be an effective sponsor is usually desired, along with the budget to ‘pay’ for it. I put ‘pay’ in quotes because all the dollars spent on a projec...

Internal Business Analysis and Consulting teams are increasingly recognised as playing a vital role in delivering successful projects.  More and more they are contributing to complex and strategic projects and performance expectations from executives are getting higher. Are you interested in improving Business Analysis and Internal Consul...

In recent years I have done three things which have really ‘ramped up’ my performance at work.    In my readings online, in books and journals I have learned that there is serious researchedevidence that these three things are possible some of the best ways to improve your skills and ability at work (particularly in a thinking job like ...

There are several studies out there that identify why projects go wrong and what you have to have in place to make sure they have a chance. Naturally the readers of Modern Analyst (and BetterProjects.net) are aware of the importance of good requirements management, a theme which permeates the list below, culled from a range of PM literature[1]....