The Community Blog for Business Analysts

If you are writing a letter to your mother, it is fine to create a new a new blank document, type your random thoughts, add highlighting, colors and emphasized text where you want to make and get a point across, and basically format the document with any creative ideas that you feel appropriate. When working with documents in the workplace, ad hoc...

I may be overreaching but I include risk analysis as a proper subject of systems analysis. I've done enough TRAs to justify that position—at least to myself. So here's a risk analysis topic. Toying with the idea of getting some certification I took a look at the CISSP and ISC Common Body of Knowledge.  One thing I found odd enough to exchan...

SAP has announced a SaaS BI service that looks ideal for SMBs.  It seems to have all the tricks you'd expect, so it's worth learning about. Problem: SAP is being cute about their pricing and I don't want to waste a lot of time on this if it turns out to be another overpriced SAP product. Has anyone got any idea what SAP intends t...

How many times have you experienced a disagreement between colleagues, only find out later in the project that they were both correct. Chances are that they were using the same word, but both had different ideas of its meaning. [1] I can derive hours of entertainment by playing word games with my friends, by picking a word they are using and purpo...

How often do you see the same piece of information documented in 2 places? I am used to seeing requirements information copied into design documents; whole sets of requirements being copied into a test repository and diagrams copied from one document to another. Unless you employ a strict change management control system that includes a traceabilit...

This following blogs contain rants and recommendations for good practices, useful not only for when delivering software, but that can also be used any time organization is required. The most common improvements that can be leveraged on any (some on every) development process it has been my experience to be involved with, are the following: ...

Requirements I have been working with requirements for more than 20 years. To be honest, it was several years before I understood the true purpose of requirements. The enlightenment came about when I was tasked with documenting a presentation to my colleagues that described the characteristics of a ‘good’ requirement. The characteristics that the ...

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...

I am in charge of a relatively big training effort for a project (approximately 45 live training sessions in 10 weeks, as well as online training opportunities) to assist with the deployment of a new piece of software.  The live training alone will involve over 450 people and will be quite in depth and hands on.  Training often plays a cr...

I seem to find quite a few job postings for Business Analysts that have a couple of lines in the ‘tasks to perform’ description that scare me like: Define test strategy and test plan Develop and execute test cases Perform stress and load test scenarios It’s not that I don’t believe I am capable of these tasks at some l...