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).

Of all the reasons for data quality problems, I find user interface design issues to be the most interesting. This may be because it is tied to the software requirements, and I have worked as a requirements analyst for a number of years.

Next time you start to think that your stakeholder is crazy, ask yourself why. Chances are that there is a rational rationale, and it will be up to you to come up with a solution that meets the needs of your organization and your stakeholders.

The World Cup fever is in full swing, presenting an opportunity for all of us to reflect on some real-life lessons the world of football (soccer) offers to BAs interested in getting better at their craft.

I have had business friends over the years ask me why it seems so difficult and time consuming to upgrade their corporate systems to take advantage of the latest computer technology. In their minds, their systems are relatively simple; the concepts of such things as accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory, manufacturing, etc. are relatively straight forward. Yet, companies incur millions of dollars in keeping them up-to-date. The question is, "Why?"

The TDM business glossary is the home for naming conventions, data types, and domain values that are meaningful to, and defined by, the business audience. Best of all is that resulting decision models are exactly as the business community wants and in the business’s own terminology.