Soft Skills

We know that we must involve all the stakeholders if we want to discover a project’s requirements. But we need some guidelines on how to involve the right people and, given how busy everyone is, how to minimize the time and maximize the result. In this article, requirements expert Ellen Gottesdiener (www.ebgconsulting.com) shares her consider...

Just how important is it to fully develop your project’s requirements? After all, nailing down your requirements usually takes only 8% to 15% of your overall project effort. Truth be told, it’s not really something you’ll want to spend your resources and energy on—unless, that is, you care at all about the quality of your pr...

In the larger context of life, it is very clear that negotiation skills are very important and that those that have them are better off than those who don’t. What about in business analysis? Are negotiation skills important? The answer is an emphatic: YES! You bet they are! Business analysts negotiate or facilitate negotiations at...

As outsourcing, global commerce and constantly improving technology continue to change the business world, specialized professionals like scientists, engineers and information technology (IT) workers (including business systems analysts) are increasingly being asked to take on more business-oriented tasks. These tasks can include communicating...

Author: Derrick Brown and Jan Kusiak This extract from IRM’s training material looks at how systematic, creative thinking techniques can be used to design practical solutions to business problems. The first step in developing a solution is to identify and define the problem - see the IRM paper Problem Analysis Techniques. Using the problem definit...