This final article in the Requirements in Context series discusses detailed requirements for a fully automated business activity. ‘Fully automated’ means that the business information system (BIS) is expected to perform the activity from start to finish without user involvement. A simple example is the system automatically posting a monthly fee against customer accounts. A more complex example is the system utilizing customer-specific pricing details to determine the amount charged for a purchase made by a customer.

As the pandemic continues to upend life around the world, data, big and small, takes a central role in mobilizing the right efforts to prevent a much greater calamity. And as people and organizations face unprecedented hardships, business analysts, data scientists, and data analysts are going to be integral to the solution. We have the skills that the world is counting on to arm our leaders with the best possible information as they are tasked with making immediate choices, allocating resources, and anticipating the next obstacles to overcome.

Visual analysis models provide a powerful set of tools that let business analysts depict system information at various levels of abstraction. These models serve as an aid to understanding, as well as an aid to communicating. Alas, I fear that modeling is somewhat of a neglected practice. I believe modeling is an essential skill every BA should master. Here’s why.

Knowing how your users behave and how they rate user experience is important, but it is very hard to learn that without various UX metrics and tools. The quality of user experience is a complex matter; you cannot use one tool to measure the whole experience, as it is built from several smaller components.

Understanding your users’ attitudes and behaviors on your site is key for providing a better user experience. There are many tools and metrics out there and most of them are data-driven. That means that collecting and analyzing data from your site has never been more important than it is today.

In this article, we will take a look at how you can measure user experience on your site, and why is it so important. Also, we will share some of the tools that you can use to measure it, and what you can measure.

First of all, any operating system or solution contains two types of requirements: functional and non-functional. The solution works as a clock, which requires each gear within the solution to be properly functioning. Based on the theory of constraints, any process throughput can only be improved when the constraint or bottleneck is resolved.

Therefore, no matter how fast the train can run and how many passengers it can carry in one trip (the functional requirements), as long as the NFRs are not met, the performance of the solution (subway system) can only be as good as the non-functional requirements.

Second, if NFRs are not considered during the business analysis process, it is very likely they were not part of the criteria for solution evaluation. Without consideration of NFRs, the proposed solution may not be evaluated accurately. What was thought to be the best solution may not be a suitable solution at all.

Has society become so unimaginative in the products, services, organisations and societies that we choose to create? Have we started giving up on ‘inspiration’ and ‘excitement’ as values with the way in which we create schools, workplaces and organizational cultures? My personal belief is that Business Analysts are ideally and uniquely positioned by make an incredible and positive difference in the world.

After some research, I was taken back with so many machine learning applications already in use: weather forecasting, medical diagnoses, law enforcement, and self-driving vehicles. Also, I did not realized that it was the advancements of big data and faster computing that allowed the break-thru of AI in our daily lives. Most of us, I believe, think that artificial intelligence is still science fiction. Not so! We as business analysts need to pursue AI education and recognize the many business opportunities opening up to all of us.

Perhaps you’ve seen a sign at an auto repair shop that asked, “What do you want: good, fast, or cheap? Pick two.” While humorous, the sign is also wise: it acknowledges the reality of trade-offs. You generally cannot optimize every desired outcome of a given situation.  The notion of such a “triple constraint” or “iron triangle” appears throughout project management. The problem is that I have seen numerous representations of the triangle with various parameters on the triangle’s vertices—size, cost, time, or scope—and various assumptions made about what is being held constant, such as quality or functionality. I’ve also seen diagrams that show four project dimensions. So, in my view, the traditional “triple constraint” is wrong, although the concept of constraints and trade-offs is certainly valid.

It’s important for business analysts to recognize that there is a significant amount of non-technical (i.e. business) detail associated with a system interface capability. The interface is either importing data that’s needed and available in electronic format from another system, or exporting data in electronic format when it’s needed by some other system or organization. The data is either needed in real time or can be processed as a batch job.

It’s more important than ever for software organizations to build a healthy engineering culture. Healthy cultures rally developers around common goals: shipping high-quality work, continuously improving, and having fun in the process. Your culture is key to recruiting and retaining the talent you need to ship exceptional customer experiences.

Corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) continue as a critical means for enterprises to meet strategic objectives such as growing market share or acquiring new capabilities. However, rate of successful outcomes has not grown at the same pace as the number or M&As themselves. In this post, Dr. Coghill argues the case for using enterprise architecture to provide increased visibility and clarity around M&A objectives to support improved outcomes. 

Learning about mental models and how to apply them to their work is one of the best investments for business analysts interested in achieving the level of deep thinking that leads to better outcomes for their projects and organizations.  There is incredible power in using inversion at the outset of a project to imagine ourselves in a future where the solution has not only been delivered, but is in the hands of end-users to get their job done. Rather than simply going through the typical project phases in forward motion, we can then look backward and gain additional perspective into what might go wrong so that preventive steps can be taken to avoid those bad outcomes.

Several years ago I was looking for examples using the generalization / specialization technique with use cases. They are not easier to find. And they are typically limited to a use case diagram like the two below. This article provides examples of both the diagrams and the scenarios for a future gas station business.