There’s an old fable about six blind men who encountered an elephant for the first time. Although they couldn’t see it, they wanted to learn what an elephant was like. Each of them touched a different part of the elephant.

The Agile Extension to the BABOK® describes “business analysis areas of knowledge, their associated activities and tasks, and the skills necessary to be effective in their execution within the framework of agile software development”.  Below are 3 misconceptions that, in my opinion, the current draft of the Agile Extension is helping perpetuate.
 

Your meeting is underway and while you’re attentively listening to the business SME explain the detailed process for transferring a policy from one agency to another, you find yourself feverishly jotting down notes as the nuggets of information being thrown out are too juicy not to capture. Then it hits you: you have no idea what the business SME is talking about!
 

Today’s letter is “C” – for Class Diagrams. Business Analysts use Class Diagrams to help them discover ‘structural’ business rules and to document them in a visual form that is readily understood by developers.  What is a structural rule?

Agile development is an approach that evolves requirements and software through iterative deliverables. One of its principles is to deliver working software frequently, often through a series of two to three week iterations.  The Decision Model (TDM) is a model for the full and rigorous specification of logic.

In many organizations, culture and conventional wisdom make it difficult for the BA to break out of mostly tactical roles within projects. However, in many ways, the future competitiveness of your organization (and consequently of your future employment) depends on it! So don’t blink or you will miss out on the best BA opportunity of your career.

In a nutshell, a methodology represents a series of steps in a project specifying Who is to perform What, When, Where, Why, and How (aka, "5W+H"), from start to finish. Perhaps the best way to think of a methodology is as a roadmap or an assembly line where a product is developed over a series of work stations.

A data flow diagram (commonly abbreviated to DFD) shows what information is needed within a process, where it is stored, and how it moves through a system to accomplish an objective. As its name implies, a data flow diagram depicts the flow of data within a system.

Welcome to the new series of articles on the BA as the 21st Century Creative Leader. It was a perfect storm. As we entered the second decade of the 21st century, we found ourselves struggling to adapt. ... It is no coincidence that the business analysis profession is taking hold to address many of the 21st century business challenges.
 

This article proposes a use case best practice technique: Always document decisions separately and explicitly in use case scenarios. This practice assists the business analyst in identifying where alternate and exception paths may be needed.This is similar to how decisions and resulting gateways are documented in Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN).

A business model should include behavioral rules, decision rules, operational business decisions, and operational business events — all as first-class citizens. Understanding their intertwined roles is key to creating top-notch business solutions and business operation systems unmatched in their support for business agility and knowledge retention. This article explains how such true-to-life business models can be created.

I’m pleased to continue to uphold: the unveiling of this year’s top 10 business analysis trends. This year business analysts (BAs) will need not only the balanced portfolio of technical and business skills they have been perfecting, but also a more comprehensive perspective in order to meet the challenging business environment of 2012.

Creating a BA Center of Excellence (BA COE) is a proven method for effectively reaching these goals with a BA team. In addition to improving BA performance in the traditional fields of elicitation and drafting, they aid in improving the other ‘soft’ skills that are becoming increasingly mandatory for a BA to possess.

At some stage in their working life, every business analyst will have some involvement with data modelling. They may need to model how data is (or will be) used or - if they only deal with requirements investigation - then someone else in the team will need to verify that the data to support new functions will be available.

There are several situations in which recording only high-level requirements information increases the project’s risk. When you encounter situations such as the ones described in this article, expect to spend more time than average developing detailed requirements specifications.