The Community Blog for Business Analysts

To be an average analyst is fairly simple... ....  all you have to do is go to all the meetings, complete all the mandatory training courses, and listen to feedback from your manager. But... IF you want to be a GREAT analyst - if you want to truly be successful  THEN that's not enough.  To truly succ...

This post describes three great tools for managing bulleted lists in Microsoft Word. They allow you to automatically punctuate them , reorder them , and select them for further processing. This post complements my earlier article Three Great Tools for Editing Tables that described tools for efficiently entering and numbering the content in Micr...

I use Microsoft Word a great deal in my work as a BA, it is my primary tool for formally communicating text based project deliverables.  Where I can, I like to use tables, so that I can quickly capture information and present it without having to write full, grammatically correct paragraphs. Over the last few years, I have prepared a numbe...

ABSTRACT Software development is burdened with high levels of complexity (and many unknowns), yet it requires perfection for the software to compile and work. Because of these factors, no estimation approach is going to be foolproof. It is believed that relative item point estimation is just as accurate as any alternative (WBS, UCP) while offering...

The question will undoubtedly arise during your tenure as a business analyst, ‘How do I manage a difficult stakeholder?’ I once encountered a stakeholder, a very highly respected mathematician, who had developed an application based on a mathematical model of his weather systems. The algorithm was amazing. The application sucked. It wa...

As part of preparation to sit the IIBA CBAP exam, I wanted a one page summary of the overall BABOK flow. The first step of creating a summary matrix showing a derived master list of documents (e.g. Inputs + Outputs) versus the process that creates or uses it was interesting, but not entirely helpful. By using the matrix to create an indicative ...

Warnier diagrams are not well known. They were introduced in the age of Structured Systems Analysis and are now forgotten. However they are the best tool for solving complex problems. Sometimes you need to model complex logic with multiple different exception scenarios. Sometimes you need to come up with requirements for complex functionality like ...

(Image credit: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/14918242487402982/)   Tired of holding those long and boring meetings with your analysts and stakeholders to encourage them to come up with new ideas and strategies for your business? It seems more of drudgery than a productive exercise when you find yourself lecturing your team for hours on en...

 “Bring me solutions, not problems”. How often have we heard those words uttered by management? In the main it’s a sensible ask however, for a Business Analyst, quite the opposite is true. Our job is to define business problems when often we are presented with solutions. “We need a new reporting tool because the MI we receive isn’t always cor...

This is one of the most frequently asked questions I have encountered ever since I have started training business analysts. Before exploring ‘how’, one should ask ‘why do I want to become a business analyst?’ Is it just because every talented individual want to do it, or you want better opportunity, or for better salary. In my opinion, if you have...