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.

Predictive Analytics can play a massive role in the simplification of Big Data. The role it plays comes down to getting the most out of this Big Data, and it starts with what some people refer to this as the fourth “V” of Big Data (Velocity, Variety, Volume), and that is Value. Predictive Analytics takes all of the data available and can pull the most important elements of that data, helping to create a predictive model or create an ideal profile to help organizations in many different aspects of the business.

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?

Multiple stages of a project can benefit from brainstorming, from identifying your stakeholders, to eliciting requirements, to enterprise analysis. In UML for the IT Business Analyst, Howard Podeswa describes brainstorming as useful “during the Initiation phase and whenever the project is ‘stuck’”.

The purpose of this article is to assist business analysts in writing business requirements. This article provides six guidelines on technical writing. The six I cite here are the major ones I consider when writing a business requirements document (BRD).There are, of course,other technical writing guidelines; for comprehensive texts, see Further Reading (1). 

Managers should do some soul-searching; do they really need that information or are they interfering with the responsibilities of others? My advice to managers is simple: Delegate responsibility, hold people accountable, and get out of their way.

Simple requirements changes often have far-reaching impacts, necessitating that many parts of the product be modified. It’s hard to find all the system components that might be affected by a requirement modification. Assessing the impact of a proposed change is easier if you have a road map that shows where each requirement or business rule was implemented in the software.

Business process management (BPM) is evolving rapidly in the face of ongoing advancements in technology, an increasingly multigenerational workforce, and an evolving and complex regulatory landscape. Underpinning every BPM initiative is a focus on creating and sharing professional process diagrams.

All paths to organizational decision modeling encounter a common question: How do you introduce The Decision Model into an organization? More specifically, how do you gain management attention for delivering decision models as a standard practice? This month’s column addresses that question.