As a business analyst you are the all-important glue between the business and technology. Your skills range from various kinds of modeling to gathering of high-level as well as detailed robust requirements. Sometimes you operate in traditional systems development and sometimes within agile approaches. A business analyst’s responsibilities are wide and deep... What Are the New Opportunities for Business Analysts?
The CEO of a major corporation who was present when I described requirements traceability at a seminar asked, “Why wouldn’t you create a requirements traceability matrix for your strategic business systems?” That’s an excellent question. He clearly saw the value of having that kind of data available to the organization for each of its applications. If you agree with this executive's viewpoint, you might be wondering how to incorporate requirements traceability into your systems development activities in an effective and efficient way.
Recently I saw the movie “42,” based on the true story of Jackie Robinson,who in 1947 bravely fought custom, bigotry, and violent hostility to become the first African American to play major league baseball. His courage came from his inner strength which allowed him to withstand with dignity the cruel behavior from fans, other team managers and players, and at first some of his own teammates.
Many BAs are using the BABOK which contains information about a Requirements Management process, from identifying organizational situations that give cause to a project, through to starting the requirements gathering process, to delivering a solution to the business or a client. TOGAF 9, from an Enterprise Architecture viewpoint, also provides some techniques to gather requirements to equally deliver business solutions. This paper illustrates the two processes, defines the mapping between the two approaches and identifies gaps in each.
If business analysts are to enable innovation, we must learn to decode the wishes of our customers into requirements that drive toward what the solution must achieve, without specifying how to achieve it. We can do this by formulating our requirements in abstract, technology-neutral descriptions, learning from patent claims how to achieve this difficult balancing act.
The web has opened a flood of learning resources for enterprises. It has reduced costs, extended learning channels and increased learning efficiencies. However, these benefits are only available to businesses that understand the new ways that we are absorbing and spreading information. By incorporating important elements of social curation and automation, Bloomfire remains a step ahead of the curve. It offers the advantages of reduced costs with increased employee engagement and productivity. The solution has created a tool for knowledge sharing and adoption and carved a new vertical of its own.
Business Analysis is the first link in the chain. Unfortunately many times it is also the weakest link. Probably because we have never considered the most important issue: Business Analysis is a people-oriented process. Why then do we behave like engineers with our UML diagrams and so forth? Furthermore, many people believe that Business Analysis is just a matter of describing the business as it is – which is completely wrong: Good Business Analysis is full of insight and is forward looking. The process itself can be meaningful, eye opening and creative.
In this rapidly changing situation, there are great opportunities for business analyst professionals who can propose resourceful modernization solutions at a fraction of the initial development cost.
Would organizations use such a model? What kinds of organizations? Who in those organizations would introduce it and create them? What would organizations use it for? How successful would these decision models be? After seven years, we have answers.They tell an interesting story about the birth and usage of this new kind of model.
A missing ingredient in most current approaches to IT requirements and business rules is developing a standard business vocabulary, a concept model. Every business analyst should be familiar with the technique – it’s simply about clear thinking and unambiguous communication. What are basic constructs in developing a concept model? This article discusses four prefabricated elements of structure, ones that will enable you to build a complete and robust business vocabulary.
Every now and then I encounter a programmer who adamantly contends you cannot have an information system without some form of computer support. Actually, we've had such systems well before the advent of the computer.
At long last, Business Analysts are stepping into the spotlight... Most BAs, however, still rely on documents and spreadsheets to manually stitch together their requirements. For those BAs, this article points out five ways that documents and spreadsheets are hurting your career and preventing you from joining the growing number of BAs who are fully equipped for the future of the profession…
The most common way to represent the links between requirements and other system elements is in a requirements traceability matrix, also called a requirements trace matrix or a traceability table. When I’ve set up such matrices in the past, I made a copy of the baselined SRS and deleted everything except the labels for the functional requirements.
Since its inception, the CPRE Foundation Level certification has evolved to become the most achieved certificate in Requirements Engineering (RE) worldwide. Right now, over 10,000 people have been certified worldwide in more than 35 countries. So what is it all about, how is it set up, what are the contents of the CPRE syllabi and how does the CPRE compare to other certifications?
brought to you by enabling practitioners & organizations to achieve their goals using:
enabling practitioners & organizations to achieve their goals using: