There are a myriad of requirements elicitation methods. The BABOK lists nine (Brainstorming, Document Analysis, Focus Groups, Interface Analysis, Interviews, Observation, Prototyping, Requirements Workshops, Survey/Questionnaire), but there are many more methods out there such as protocol analysis , job application design , and so on).

If you read the title and thought to yourself, “Hey, Mulvey got it wrong, it’s ‘Measure Twice, Cut Once’” I’ll bet you have had an experience with someone who used the old woodworking term. Woodworkers use it to indicate it’s better to double-check your measurements before you commit to cutting the wood, lest you waste time redoing work (and incurring expense if you have to buy more wood). It’s a great proverb to get you to think about double-checking your work and confirming your measurements. But what I’m talking about is using the measurement as an enterprise asset – once you create the measurement, use that over an over when you are working on different projects.

The purpose of this article is to show an example of using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) to document the home medical process of peritoneal dialysis plus using 5S principles in the treatment workspace.

...As hands-on business ownership of decision automation gains ground it is becoming apparent that fully automating a decision-making process requires an expanded concept of business rules that includes the ability to transform and/or derive data within the rules process itself, in order to align the input data with the policy statements that are driving the decisions; and to produce a wider range of outcomes.

Have you recently accepted your first business analyst position? Are you starting a new business analyst role and wondering what skills you should work on first? ...what follows are the 10 skills that new business analysts tend to need to work on first.

I became a father two years ago. Shortly thereafter, I realized that many of my professional skills were readily transferable to my new role at home: Goals and expectations setting, listening, perseverance, flexibility and facilitation. But it would take a tense encounter with 18-month-old some time later to understand that my problem-solving skills as a dad were far more applicable to the workplace than I had ever imagined.

The world of business rules and business rule management has grown up. It has evolved into the world of business decisions – a much more compelling discipline by which companies can master their business logic.

Interaction skills are a soft skill set that includes tactful communication, mediation, and diplomacy. BABOK divides interaction skills into three broad areas: facilitation and negotiation, leadership and influencing, and teamwork. All of these skills encompass the ability to navigate politics, even in tricky territory, in order to bring people together in consensus on a project, to mitigate conflicts, and to help people feel heard.

In an ideal world, a single, full-time, expert user would indeed be sitting within view—“on sight”—of developers, ready at a moment’s notice to speak definitively for the entire user community. In reality, this is unlikely in most situations.

SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. By using these four areas to identify an organization’s characteristics and climate, a SWOT Analysis offers a high-level evaluation of your company’spros and cons.The goal of a SWOT Analysis is to help an organization to identify strategies for success.

There’s little argument that investigating and identifying business needs (i.e. requirements) is a critical task of business analysis. However it’s of little use correctly identifying business needs if we can’t then effectively document them - to the clients who will be paying for the solution and to the developers who will be building it. In today’s time poor world we need to address both audiences in a single document.

I never really understood the hubbub associated with system design. People tend to look upon it as a complicated process. Actually it's not, yet the corporate landscape is littered with disastrous system projects costing millions of dollars, all because developers overlooked some rather simple principles for design and focused on technology instead.

Use case diagrams are used to show the decomposition of a business problem or software solution into a set of discrete functions (the use cases) which can be enacted by or on behalf of users (the actors). In a nutshell, this diagram shows who (the actors) can do what (the use cases) when interacting with the software solution.

With the vast array of data that organizations have access to, Customer Analytics is becoming a top priority so you can predict how customers will behave when they receive a catalog, enter a store, research and buy online, or interact with your organization in any other way. The more you know about customer and prospect preferences, the more successful you will be at creating relevant offers that resonate with them positively.

...Why, even with the word Analyst in our title, is the role of BA more associated with requirements rather than analytics? My hypothesis is pretty simple:  If Business Analysts are not required to produce specific analysis related artifacts, then both analytical competencies and requirements efficacy will be diminished.