The “good old workshop”. As a business analyst practitioner and trainer I often get asked the question “should we use a workshop?” quickly followed by “how do we run it?”. This article addresses the first question (subsequent articles will look at the second).

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.

Makes me wonder if the industry really grasps the duties and responsibilities of the BA. The industry talks about such people, but have we standardized a job description? We wrote several such descriptions as part of our “PRIDE” Methodologies for IRM and based on this, let me see if I can establish a standard job description.

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.

This is a complete example of a Business/Systems Analysis Model using UML and including: Use Cases, Activity Diagrams, Context Diagram, and more.

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 advantages of attaining a certification, such as the CBAP, are difficult to overstate; the benefits are numerous. If you have the necessary experience, the designation is likely within your reach. You can easily form a feasible plan (even using your analyst skills, if you wish) for applying for and achieving the CBAP, and boost the direction of your career today. 

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.

As a business analyst you don’t have to put on a disguise to do your job, but you can take lessons from Undercover Boss; ask questions and discover where you can make business processes or systems operate more efficiently, engage and collaborate with your business stakeholders to get needed information from those subject matter experts, and make recommendations to decision-makers to solve business problems that you have discovered along the way.

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?

Problems arise though when the critical front-end work is performed by programmers who are more in tune with technology than business. From their perspective, they see everything in terms of zeroes and ones, not in dollars and cents. Not surprising, they only think in terms of elegant technical solutions, not necessarily what is practical from a business perspective.

In the past few years, software development has been shifting more and more from traditional to agile practices. This change impacts how business analysts perform their role. Here are three key aspects of the business analysis work that are different in an agile environment

In order to plan the analysis phase of a project, the business analyst (BA) identifies all the analysis tasks and the associated risk, cost, time and resources. The BA then uses this information to develop a schedule for accomplishing the analysis. To assist in this planning, the BA can use a renowned project management tool: the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).