I’ve written this article to provide an overview of AWS (Amazon Web Services) for Business Analysts.
The cloud (in particular AWS) is now a part of many projects. If you’ve been in meetings where people have mentioned: ‘EC2’, ‘ELB’, ‘AZs’ and thought ‘WTF’ then this article should help you.
This article will provide:
A picture is worth a thousand words. Charts offer visualization and help to understand and comprehend things that would be more painful and time consuming to understand by reading free text. Diagrams help us design systems and processes, organize our screens, while facilitating a common understanding of the big picture. They help us make visible the invisible.
Αs a BA you can exploit a big variety of diagrams to help you communicate better and more accurate information concerning the requirements and the solution. Diagrams leverages the effective use of visuals and modeling techniques in helping organizations and individuals work from the 30,000 foot view down to the level of detail that is needed by those who are actually going to perform the process activities. Moreover a diagram can serve as a single point of truth navigating what should be done and saving time from questions deriving from ambiguous point may found in a text.
A quick way of learning the techniques and skills for becoming a business analyst is to get an internationally recognized certification like ECBA.
ECBA provides a firm understanding and a solid foundation for a business analysis career. It is the entry-level certification from IIBA aimed at professionals stepping into the BA domain.
As an analyst you have to ensure your own understanding of the bigger picture. You have to zoom in and zoom out frequently. You need to analyze either in small initiatives the context under which the ba work will take place. It is possible to get so focused on the solution that your thoughts are stuck only in delivering the solution and forgetting to revisit frequently the alignment with the scope and the context.
When I started my business analysis career back in the late 1990’s, career development was considered “the individual’s responsibility”. Over my career I’ve managed several teams of Business Analysis resources, and I think that mentality has changed over time. There are benefits for the manager and the organization to help their team members develop in their career. By helping your team members grow you can get...
The BABOK talks of the underlying competencies for a Business Analyst at length. At the core of all those competencies is the ability to build relationships. In other words, it is the foundation. The aptitudes are not noticed unless you have a relationship with the stakeholders. Demonstrating these capabilities helps enhance your relationships even further. So, I will even say relationship building is a prefix and a suffix to competencies. Everything revolves around your ability to build relationships.
A change request (CR) is basically any change in the initial set of signed-off requirements. So, typically in a waterfall model implementation, the requirements phase ensures that all the requirements (features/functionalities/functional and non-functional) are agreed upon and documented before development starts. After that, any new scope brought or requested by clients becomes a change request. There is an additional cost associated with implementing a change request.
Even in the agile model of working, although there is flexibility in the implementation of the project, vendors ensure that a high-level set of requirements are discussed and agreed upon. The iterative way of working ensures that clients have their eyes on the product as it is developing and can suggest corrections or alignments. However, no vendor can work with entirely flexible requirements. It's not feasible from a budgeting standpoint.
The job of a business analyst is possibly one of the most diversified and can barely fit into a fixed set of tasks and responsibilities. While most business analysts have been turning around initiatives and solutions in their organization, many work with the sales and marketing team to make the products and solutions a winner in the market by bringing out features based on market needs.
Most business analysts play a key role in facilitating digital transformation projects in their organization by designing systems that align with business goals. They also play a pivotal role in implementing new business processes, removing inefficiencies from the existing processes, and reducing operational costs.
Business analysts, process analysts, systems analysts, and process owners use Business Process Normalization to more effectively elicit and perceive, unequivocally define, and model sound, modern business process structures, and workflow configurations. Proficiency with this analysis technique benefits their process management, digital transformation, and regulatory compliance projects.
Recent years have brought a stream of exciting developments in the field of Business Process Management (BPM). The maturation of advanced analytics and AI technology have given way to a new approach to BPM called Augmented BPM. This article explores the trends driving the emergence of Augmented BPM and how organizations can start benefitting from these trends.
Knowledge isn’t like other commodities. If I have three dollars and give you one of them, now I have only two dollars. Money is zero-sum in the sense that I must lose some of it for you to gain something in this transaction. In contrast, if I give you some of my knowledge, I still possess all the knowledge myself. I can share it with other people, as can you. Everyone touched by this expanding circle of knowledge benefits. Everyone has something to teach—and to learn. You don’t need to be the world’s expert on some topic to be helpful. You just need some useful block of knowledge and the willingness to share it. In the world of technology, if you’re one week ahead of the next person in some area, you’re a wizard. Someone else will doubtless be ahead of you in other areas, so take advantage of their trailblazing. People in a healthy learning culture share what they know and also acknowledge that someone else might know a better way.
One of the most empowering aspects of the agile mindset is that fact that agile teams are generally self-organized verses the traditional command and control protocols of traditional project management. While there are several benefits to self-organizing teams, it can lead to failure if the team misses some key planning aspects during team formation. Agile chartering is key to executing successful agile initiatives. In general, agile charters consist of the project charter and a team charter. The project charter defines the project vision and objectives, while the team charter establishes how the team will work together and how they can incorporate agile values as the team collaborates. A team charter is especially critical when organizations are new to the process of incorporating agile frameworks into the organization as it will facilitate knowledge transfer and identify key learning opportunities. With that said, here are some key reasons agile teams need team charters.
Business knowledge is simply knowing your business—its facets, strengths, weaknesses, competition, challenges, positioning within the market, and readily available solutions to its daily problems. Strong business knowledge should inform everything you do. So, what you learn and hear in discovery should be filtered through your business knowledge. What you define in your requirements should also be informed by your business knowledge. As one business analysis writer puts it, “I’ve always been of the opinion that I’d like to know as much as I can about whatever I can because you never know when something you learned may come in handy.”[2] The following four areas are the ones, specifically, according to BABOK, that you’ll want to apply yourself to.
The quality of any data analysis created to inform business decisions will ultimately be constrained by the quality of the underlying data. If the data is faulty, then the analysis will be faulty too. This is why data wrangling–the transformation of raw data into a format that is appropriate for use–has become such a ubiquitous task in most organizations. Unfortunately, the significance of data wrangling is still often overlooked. And this is where data-savvy business analysts can help save the day.
Thanks to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) architectures, the utility of and business case for model-driven, no-code and low-code platforms have become more compelling than ever. More and more enterprises are entrusting their digital transformation, regulatory compliance, and business process management objectives to model-driven, no-code or low-code business application platforms. These model driven platforms also raise the bar for the business process modeling skills of the business analysts, systems analysts and process owners who use them.
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