The Community Blog for Business Analysts

We look for the best and brightest when hiring for Requirements Analysts and Product Managers. It’s a long and difficult process with many people applying; only a fraction get through the first interview and even less are able to hang in the process as it continues. This has brought great strain to our company: as we expand we simply aren’t able to...

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...

  Telecommunications companies are looking to cloud computing to clean up inefficient processes throughout the sales channel. The products and services in this industry change so often that these companies have become more competitive than ever, with continuously shrinking margins. Flexible front end solutions bring agility to the sales proce...

Its being held in Sydney Australia September 27th- October 1st 2010.If you are attending this conference don’t miss out on the  Requirements Engineering Education and Training Workshop that is taking place September 28th. Do you want to broaden your skills? Learn new techniques?  This is the workshop for you. This workshop will add...

This Summer, Gartner produced a research paper entitled "BPA for the Masses: Is it Real?". The paper discusses the increasing popularity of business process modeling tools that can be used by business people. Gartner's position is that the business people have the greatest understanding of their process and can now be equipped with tools that enabl...

A Mendiom is an idiom with a Mendix twist. This is the first of a series of posts with Mendioms for different types of people. This week, we have chosen a few of our favorite Mendioms for business analysts.   Business analysts are an important part of an organization’s business agility. By having the responsibility of communicating between b...

Being a relatively new Requirements Analyst/ Business Analyst ( BA) and being new to the industry, I have been blessed with the opportunity to have mentors. Receiving direction from more experienced BA’s has definitely helped me find areas that I can improve on, while at the same time, finding my strengths and improving those too. Yet there stil...

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...

Last year, I wrote about my Lessons from a Bad Haircut. I’m please to say I finally have a lesson from a good haircut. How did I finally get a good haircut? It was what the stylist did after I explained what I wanted. She drew a quick sketch. It took about 15 seconds. And, with that sketch, I was able to say “No, that’s not what I want.” 60 ...

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...