Multiple stages of a project can benefit from brainstorming, from identifying your stakeholders, to eliciting requirements, to enterprise analysis. In UML for the IT Business Analyst, Howard Podeswa describes brainstorming as useful “during the Initiation phase and whenever the project is ‘stuck’”.

The purpose of this article is to assist business analysts in writing business requirements. This article provides six guidelines on technical writing. The six I cite here are the major ones I consider when writing a business requirements document (BRD).There are, of course,other technical writing guidelines; for comprehensive texts, see Further Reading (1). 

Managers should do some soul-searching; do they really need that information or are they interfering with the responsibilities of others? My advice to managers is simple: Delegate responsibility, hold people accountable, and get out of their way.

Simple requirements changes often have far-reaching impacts, necessitating that many parts of the product be modified. It’s hard to find all the system components that might be affected by a requirement modification. Assessing the impact of a proposed change is easier if you have a road map that shows where each requirement or business rule was implemented in the software.

Business process management (BPM) is evolving rapidly in the face of ongoing advancements in technology, an increasingly multigenerational workforce, and an evolving and complex regulatory landscape. Underpinning every BPM initiative is a focus on creating and sharing professional process diagrams.

All paths to organizational decision modeling encounter a common question: How do you introduce The Decision Model into an organization? More specifically, how do you gain management attention for delivering decision models as a standard practice? This month’s column addresses that question.
 

Successful business analysts have a mixture of many talents -- some more tangible than others – making Business Analysis both an art and a science. This article explores each area (art and science) and the types of skills necessary to be successful.

Has “Agile” killed “Use Cases”? Let us answer this question in this short article. As you may know, “Use Cases” have been a great way to document the detailed “Functional Requirements” of a system.
 

This article describes the Entity Relationship Diagram that allows you to document the structure of a database in terms of persistent entities and the relationships between them.  The Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) provides a way of graphically representing the logical relationships between entities in order to create a database schema to persist those entities.

Three questions regarding breaches of business rules should be addressed by Business Analysts: enforcement level, guidance message, and breach response. The goal is context-dependent, pinpoint reaction to breaches in real-time. Addressing breaches intelligently is key to creating friendly, agile, secure business solutions, ones that can evolve rapidly in day-to-day operation.

This article reviews the complexity of the role of the business analyst (BA) facilitator in obtaining a stakeholder agreement (i.e., a consensus or a compromise) on solution features and/or user requirements. The BA facilitator achieves this agreement by maintaining a neutral posture in guiding the stakeholders though a dialogue in a series of meetings.

Before an organization releases a new piece of software or web feature to all of its customers or the general public, it will generally offer a limited audience a chance to test drive the feature and offer their feedback. This is generally known as a Beta launch...

Many BAs wait until their requirements specification is complete before they present it to some reviewers. Busy developers, testers, project managers, and users have difficulty finding the time to scrutinize a large document on short notice. It’s far more effective to review an evolving document incrementally. Give reviewers just a few pages at a time, preferably soon after an elicitation activity.

 It is wise to use whatever techniques we can to discover the 'real' requirements and business rules before embarking on development. We all seem to know that it is cheaper to fix problems earlier rather than later in an IT project. So why do so many of our projects exhibit the same mistakes?

The product owner is an ideal. I have experienced this myself as product owner and business analyst in a scrum team. How many organizations have a job title that can cover the role completely? If not, is your organization ready to change in order to fit the scrum method? The organization I work in is not but it is still possible for the scrum team to have an efficient product owner. In our team, it was decided to adapt the role to fit our organization by establishing a product owner team in which I as business analyst am a member.