General Business Analysis

Many organizations acquire and adapt purchased packaged solutions (also called commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, products) to meet their software needs, instead of building new systems from scratch. Software as a service (SaaS), or cloud, solutions are becoming increasingly available to meet software needs as well. Whether you’re using a package as part or all of the solution for a new project or implementing a solution in the cloud, you still need requirements. Requirements let you evaluate solution candidates so that you can select the most appropriate package, and then they let you adapt the package to meet your needs. This article describes several ways to approach requirements definition when you plan to acquire a commercial package to meet your needs.

An information system maintains data in fields within records. Equally important is the system’s ability to navigate between records. Parts 5 thru 9 of this series discussed fundamental business data field types. This article discusses a record navigation field. These fields do not themselves contain business data, but support the system’s ability to navigate from a given record instance to business data in related record instances.

People sometimes ask me, “What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about software development in all that time?” Here it is, lesson #4 of the 60 lessons in my book Software Development Pearls: A usage-centric approach to requirements and design will meet customer needs better than a feature-centric approach.  Let me describe why I believe this is such an important principle.

It's tough to predict the future and same goes towards predicting business trends with certainty. But we can always predict areas which are likely to be of prominence with a fair amount of certainty.  As we all know business analysis is a profession growing at a fast pace and will continue to see this trend of growth for at least next 10 years. If you are a proactive business analyst you must keep watch on the trending topics to stay ahead of the curve and be a futuristic leader.  Here are our top 6 picks for business analysts to watch out in 2023...

This thought recently popped into my mind when someone asked me what template to follow when writing a user story. Perhaps you have encountered or asked this question before. As a Business Analyst, I want to use a template to write a user story, so that, my team will understand the requirements.  Do formats and templates really matter?

A point in time field supports a business need for an information system to know when an event took place (or will take place). Date, Time, and Date/Time field values represent a quantity of time involving a specific unit of measure and precision. Like other quantity values, they can participate in calculations (E.g. subtracting one date from another to determine the number of days in-between).

The right approaches and tools can help business analysts perform the appropriate evaluation to help businesses improve operations, revenue, and decision-making. What are the common methods business analysts use to evaluate organizations? How do the SWOT and PESTLE methods work? What approach works best for analyzing a firm’s mission and objectives? Are there methods that can analyze how the environment can impact a business? This article explores the various methods business or data analysts use to evaluate enterprises and discusses how each method works as a business analysis tool.

A classification field allows the recording of a meaningful fact about a record instance, with that fact drawn from a pre-established set of values. Online access to values applicable to a given instance might be through a drop-down or pop-up list, or as labelled check boxes or radio buttons. The organization may be interested in just the values, or there may be additional information about each value that the system needs to manage.

Business Analysts solve problems, but ultimately these solutions are meant to serve people, and it takes people to create the definition for these solutions. With that said, no matter how great an analyst is at discovery, analysis and solutioning, key soft skills are essential to being a best-in-class business analyst.

Soft skills are the people-side of business and really any type of engagement. There is a large variety of skills included in the soft skills category depending on which resource you read. But there are two that always seem to land in the top five.. 

Having discussed fields intended to name record instances, we move on to fields intended to satisfy the need to say something quantitative about a record. A quantity field requires particular attention be paid to its unit of measure (UoM) and precision. 

Sometimes the best solutions are right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. Get in the habit of working from first principles and you’ll find it easier to cut through preconceptions to change the business question and quickly see alternatives that you may have missed.

The objective of this article is to help business analysts capture functional requirements for an information system as User Stories. It discusses four levels of story. The first two levels represent business context. Levels three and four involve functional detail needed by developers and testers to deliver stories at those levels.

In this article we focus on record name fields. These fields are intended to contain a user-recognizable value by which a person or thing is known, addressed, or referred to. Unlike a record business identifier field, a name field’s value may change over time. Also, there are ‘real world’ names for things (e.g. people, cities) for which valid duplicate values can exist.