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.

In this day and age of “globalization” more and more Information Systems are crossing geographical boundaries. Because of this, serious consideration should be given to making systems universally applicable to any country. Some might consider this an impossible task, but it is actually easier than you might think. It just requires a little common sense and some planning.

As a business analyst (BA), what would you say during the initial conversation with your project manager (PM)? First, do not assume that the PM knows what to expect from a BA. In fact, this is your opportunity to set expectations and explain your value added to the project.

Tracking project status means comparing where you really are at a particular time against the expectation of what “complete” means for this development cycle.  Monitor the status of just those functional requirements that were committed for the current release, because that’s the set that’s supposed to be 100 percent done before you declare success and ship the release.

In my experience of pursuing the CBAP certification, while there are tangible benefits from the outcome of being certified, there are some very real and very significant benefits generated as a by-product of the certification process itself, even when it was painful and downright frustrating.

Some programmers consider documentation a waste of time (see “Agile programming”), even going so far as to claim it is detrimental to productivity. Instead of getting all the software specifications recorded on paper at the start, they prefer to begin hacking on the program code and keep modifying it until the end-user is satisfied.

Probably the most used facilitation technique in business analysis is brainstorming.  In summary, a group meets with a facilitator and attempts to gather as many ideas as possible to address a problem. The facilitator sets rules at the beginning of the session of which the most important is “no adverse judgment of ideas” during the session.