Business analysts of the not-too-distant future must and will become visionaries, innovators, strategists, and transformational leaders, executing strategy through project results. Successful business analysts will learn how to embrace organizational values, empower their teams to thrive, bring customers into the change process, and drive innovation through global partnerships.

It is certainly true that use cases are a powerful technique for discovering the functional requirements for a system being developed. However, this statement suggests that use cases are the only tool needed for representing a software system’s functionality. In most cases, they aren't.

Creating a product with a great user experience requires more than just user stories. While capturing the product functionality is important, the user journeys, the visual design, and the nonfunctional properties have to be described too. Stories should be complemented with other techniques including scenarios, storyboards, and design sketches.

Based on our projected trends, 2015 looks to be a year of significant change, and business analysts are on the front line of change. Several major industries, and the many organizations within them, are in the process of transition so it should be no surprise that the importance of the business analyst only increases as markets shift and organizations are forced to deal with the accelerating pace and volatility of business.

...why blame the success or failure of the project primarily on requirements? If the business analyst is not in charge of the monitoring and controlling of the project, why pass the blame on. If a decision to apply one form of methodology over the other does not rest with the BA, is it not valid to review the stewardship and question the effectiveness of the stewardship?

What is a data normalization? Normalization ensures that each attribute is assigned correctly to its proper entity. And that the attribute does not repeat within an entity and is fully dependent on its primary key and nothing but the key. Make sense? If not, let’s translate the gibberish into business language.

The 3 Amigos (sometimes referred to as a “Specification Workshop”) is a meeting where the Business Analyst presents requirements and test scenarios (collectively called a “feature”) for review by a member of the development team and a member of the quality assurance team.

User stories are probably the most popular agile technique to capture product functionality: Working with user stories is easy. But writing good stories can be hard. The following ten tips help you create good stories.

This new PMI-PBA certification for business analysis, from PMI, might introduce confusion in selecting the right certification to help you achieve your professional goals. This comparison includes application requirements, knowledge required, and your current or desired role.

The structure that use cases provide is far superior to the nearly worthless technique of asking users “What do you want?” or “What are your requirements?” In this article I share my perspectives on when use cases work well, when they don’t, and what to do when use cases aren't a sufficient solution to the requirements problem.

In the world of underlying competencies that contribute to strong business analysis, the soft skill of analytical thinking and problem solving may seem pretty self-explanatory. Clearly, it involves sorting through business problems and information in an informed, methodical way. In order to do this, an analyst must research the problem and then propose intelligent solutions.

Software developers often want to freeze the requirements following some initial requirements work and then proceed with development, unencumbered with those pesky changes. This is the classic waterfall paradigm. It doesn't work well in most situations. It’s far more realistic to define a requirements baseline and then manage changes to that baseline. This article defines the requirements baseline and describes when to create one.

A typical business function might contain several unique events each of which we want to end up as a component of a larger software application. So how do we go from a table containing textual information to a specification which a developer can use?

This article is the last in a trilogy of articles that map the evolution of a proven, practical, and robust methodology that applies decisioning techniques to fundamentally remake commercial software architecture and development.

In the book  Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions, Gerd Gigerenzer describes the two sets of mental tools required for making decisions. When risks are known, good decisions require logic and statistical thinking. But when we are dealing with unknowable risks, good decisions also require intuition and smart rules of thumb.