The Community Blog for Business Analysts

Scope – the last frontier.  We are on a mission where no business analyst has gone before.  To explore strange new diagrams and to have the project scope clearly understood.  Extra credit to those who remember which TV show that was from!  Scope and context are the number one reason business expectations about a project ar...

Being a badass isn’t about intimidation or trying to be something you simply are not.  It’s about knowing who you are and using your strengths to drive forward.  So let’s look at a few of the ways to be a badass in business: 1. Passion for Your Craft Is a Powerful and Infectious Energy Showing passion for your work in ...

The  International Institute of Business Analysis defines in its “Business Analysis Body of Knowledge” (BABoK) that business analysis is “the practice of enabling change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders”. To fulfil this task to a good standard bus...

What is the role of the business analyst? A typical response to this question is that he is a bridge between IT and business. Often this view is reinforced by textbooks and training material covering the business analysis domain. The reality is that there is still much confusion about business analysis as a discipline. In my opinion, this view...

Decision Model and Notation in short DMN is a novel way to model business decisions. DMN allows capturing and modeling business decisions in a way that is easy to understand with business people and subject matter experts. It is a combination of: Decision requirement diagram – DRD Decision table Boxed expressions Fr...

Background Like most Scrum teams, we held “Sprint Review Meeting” every two weeks. We would gather as a team to demo what was recently built & receive feedback. Although it was a great opportunity to showcase recent work, we identified a number of problems with “Sprint Review Meetings” for our mature product:  1.&...

At Seilevel, we updated and re-published our Requirements Management (RM) Tool Study this past year, looking at over 150 tools and over 200 criteria. We did this in phases with the subset of tools making it though each phase getting smaller and smaller until we ran 21 tools through the full evaluation criteria to rank them. This tool study is a gre...

The previous two posts in the Requirements Prioritization series, we discussed the honest difficulty that stakeholders face when asked to simply prioritize requirements, and how to overcome this obstacle by using prioritization parameters. If you have not read these posts, I recommend you read them first here and here....

If you’re a business analyst whose company recently made the move to agile, you may be wondering where you fit in when there is no business analyst role. Or maybe you made the move to be an agile business analyst or product owner but don’t know how your traditional business analyst skills figure into this new agile world. Well the good ...

In my previous blog post titled "All requirements are important!", I reasoned that stakeholders only appear to be uncooperative in the prioritization process. In reality, they are unable to prioritize requirements because they cannot see one requirement more or less important than the other. I urged you to ponder whether ...