Many studies have shown that requirements errors are very costly. By one estimate (in an article by Donald Firesmith for the Software Engineering Institute), requirements errors cost US businesses more than $30 billion per year and often result in failed or abandoned projects and damaged careers. The common wisdom is to find and fix requirements er...

Structure diagrams in general Structure diagrams show the static structure of the system being modeled. focusing on the elements of a system, irrespective of time. Static structure is conveyed by showing the types and their instances in the system. Besides showing system types and their instances, structure diagrams also show at least some of the ...

U.S. News and World Report published their list of Best Careers for 2008 - and Usability/User Experience Professional is one of the listed professions.  This is a business analysis related discipline with many business analysts also playing the role of UI designer. "Usability specialists make sure that products, especially technical on...

 The US News and World Report published their list of best careers for 2008 and Systems Analyst was one of the professions in the list. "The Ace Widget Co. has an ancient computer system. It'd like to upgrade to an Oracle-based operation with wireless capabilities, so employees can access the system with their BlackBerrys. The systems ...

Many organizations are scratching their collective heads over how to build and mature a business analysis center of excellence (COE). Where do we start? What does a business analysis COE look like? Who owns it? How does it evolve? This article, an excerpt from ESI’s white paper of the same name, outlines the standard operating practices necessary f...

Requirements Risk management could be a useful approach to requirements analysis, and lead to better requirements management.

High level the idea goes like this:

Risk management is an important part of project management
Requirements management is also a critical part of the puzzle
Should we be running a requirements risk management process on our projects?
The purpose of this article is to introduce the topic of Requirements risk into the Requirements Management discussion. Feedback and commentary is welcome and can be provided at ModernAnalyst.com

Requirements Simulation is a technique used to visually define and model business, user and technical requirements. The value proposition of most tools in the marketplace today is to bridge the communication gap between business and IT by empowering the Business Analyst to completely, and clearly define application requirements. Since specialized ...

Whether you call them Systems Analysts, Business Analysts, Systems Engineers, or Enterprise Architects, it is very encouraging to see this vital function being reintroduced to companies. As far as I am concerned, it was inevitable. I guess companies finally figured out you cannot satisfy your systems problems simply by using better programming tools and techniques.

Business analysis is about more than software development. It can help business leaders to understand the business and develop resourcing, training and IT strategies. Through careful analysis of workflows and business processes you can identify opportunities for increasing efficiency and profitability. You can use business analysis techniques to help you identify potential processing bottlenecks or under-utilisation of costly resources.

Business analysts go by many titles one of them being Management Consultant.  In this article, Tony Jacowski talks about the management consulting career.

Author: Tony Jacowski

In the first two installments of this series, we saw why BPMN is important to the Business Process Expert and got an overview of the notation. In this part, we’ll look beyond the spec to suggest some best practices for making your BPMN models most effective. The art of effective process modeling depends on what you are trying to do. Unlike traditi...

In the first installment of this series, we saw why BPMN is important to the Business Process Expert. In this part, we’ll look at the notation itself. In BPMN there are only three first-class diagram elements, or flow objects:  Activity, a rounded rectangle, representing work performed in the process  Gateway, a diamond, r...

Business process management (BPM) is an emerging discipline that looks at the enterprise in a radically new way. Instead of trying to automate and optimize individual functional units, like sales, supply chain, and customer service, in isolation, BPM views your company from the perspective of end-to-end cross-functional processes – exactly the way ...

What Is A Functional Specification? Functional specifications (functional specs), in the end, are the blueprint for how you want a particular web project or application to look and work. It details what the finished product will do, how a user will interact with it, and what it will look like. By creating a blueprint of the product first, time an...

Agile analysis is being spoken of more and more frequently in the world of business analysts. This form of analysis is becoming more and more popular as the next generation of business owners comes into play. It is a more hands on approach to the business analysis. There is more communication. Face to face discussions occur more frequently. E-mails and faxes are becoming few and far between. So what is agile analysis?

Author: Tony de Bree