Entries for 'Transform VA'

This article is the last in a trilogy of articles that map the evolution of a proven, practical, and robust methodology that applies decisioning techniques to fundamentally remake commercial software architecture and development.

In the book  Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions, Gerd Gigerenzer describes the two sets of mental tools required for making decisions. When risks are known, good decisions require logic and statistical thinking. But when we are dealing with unknowable risks, good decisions also require intuition and smart rules of thumb.

This column examines the three basic kinds of knowledge workers involved in business processes, and discusses how the distinctions among them are important for engineering smarter business solutions.

This article discusses Stephen King’s creative writing method and provides an example of using it in developing a use case narrative: the main scenario with alternate and exception paths. Yes, that is correct – Stephen King, the prolific writer of contemporary horror, science fiction and fantasy novels.

Strategic Enterprise Analysis is the study, modeling, and maintenance of the strategic direction of a company. This article is about conducting SEA. Moreover, it is about how a senior business analyst facilitates this executive board effort.

One of my favorite tools in business analysis is the premortem. Instead of waiting until the end of a project to find out what went wrong, and learn for the future, we can use this technique to go on an “imaginary time travel” to avert real failures.

This is the tenth in a series that explains the thinking behind the Volere [1] requirements techniques—previous and future articles explore aspects of applying these techniques in your environment. This article illustrates how the requirements travel all the way through an organisation – and beyond - and how everyone is interested in/affected by them but all for different reasons.

In this article we address the question of How TEM? by providing a deeper look into TEM main constructs and how to do a high level design in TEM. For those who missed the first article we hope that you will still find this article useful and self-contained in such a way that it will be easy to follow and understand.

An alternative to eliciting use cases and user stories is to identify the external events to which the system must respond. An event is some change or activity that takes place in the user’s environment that stimulates a response from the software system. An event-response table (also called an event table or an event list) itemizes all such events and the behavior the system is expected to exhibit in reaction to each event.

BA CoEs, in one form or another, have been around for over two decades. This longevity may very well speak for itself as this is a very long time given today’s appreciation and variety of methodologies, and the technological developments to support them. Much of the discussions around BA CoEs however have remained static. While other disciplines have modified their approach to continue to be of value; allying their tactic to compliment the focal points of a company, the dialogue around business analysis and BA CoEs has remained limited to the subject of process.

The project sponsor decides to approve or not approve the BRD. But, this is only the position of yes or no. What were the criteria used to form that position? The Risk Tolerance Model helps form the position.

Whether it’s a requirements document for a solution enhancement or a stakeholder analysis for a business case, the information cultivated by the Business Analyst can often have use beyond its initial purpose. How can we make BA work come alive for the entire organization?

The Event Model is an implementation-independent model understandable by business and technical audiences. It depicts the logic of detecting and deriving a situation of interest from a stream of open-ended event instances. It is a model for event logic that should be easier to create and understand than techniques for event processing in use by organizations today.

You can now create an instant app from your schema, and add spreadsheet-like expressions for business logic – a complete system in minutes. In this article, we review a new technology from Espresso Logic that makes your requirements – schemas and logic - into working software, and show an example of building a full application from scratch.

Can the design of the enterprise’s business processes evolve to a state where the Business Analysts can customize the business processes specifically to the requirements of the owner using inventoried primitive elements; similar to using the metaphorical inventoried components/parts for a laptop? And can these primitive elements get assembled into new/enhanced business processes within a short period of time?