The subject of current systems analysis is usually greeted with dismay or disdain by systems departments. There are many reasons for this. In many installations, the support of current systems takes more than 85% of the systems department's time, and the departments are more than ready to get on with new systems development and bury the old, non-working systems as quickly as possible. In cases where systems do not require a lot of maintenance, the systems department may find that the current systems are not giving management the kind of information it needs for effective decision making; these current systems become likely candidates for replacement.
However, there are some very legitimate reasons for documenting existing systems.
Author: Tim Bryce
"As I discussed my May article for Modern Analyst, there's a lot of hype about the role of requirements in agile projects. Many people think you don’t “do” requirements on an agile project. Hogwash. Indeed, agile projects use requirements—but just enough requirements at just the right time."
In this article Ellen covers a number of agile requirements topics including:
Author: Ellen Gottesdiener, Principal Consultant, EBG Consulting, helps business and technical teams get product requirements right so their projects start smart and deliver the right product at the right time.
A colleague of mine asked me recently what makes a good Business Analyst, and this stumped me for a while. I had a rare opportunity to go trout fly-fishing recently and as the fishing was slow I was able to contemplate this question. You will gather from this that the question had worried me as I seldom think about work stuff when I am fly-fishing.
So what does make a good Business Analyst?
I decided to go back to basics; if I want to know what makes a good Analyst then I need to ask what do we, as Business Analysts, do? If I could understand that, then I can start to understand what makes one Analyst better than another.
I asked around in business analysis circles for an on line description of what we do. Although I got a few different answers, I found I got the most consensuses with “a Business Analyst elicits, documents, and communicates business requirements”. But what does that mean?
Author: Robin Grace
How many times have you been at a project meeting, maybe a status update meeting, and heard a voice that isn’t familiar to you speaking up for the first time.
“Ah... we need to put 5 days in the project to do our VA”
A meeting room full of people turns their heads and looks at the face of the unfamiliar voice. “You need what?” the Project Manager barks.
“We need 5 days, you know, between the build and go-live for the VA.”
A Sr. Business Analyst with many years of experience pipes up, “That just won’t work. We need that time for the QA and sign-off.”
The PM, who has worked with the Sr. BA on other projects, shakes his head in agreement, “We just don’t have time for a VA, what ever that is, now let’s move on to the next item.”
That unfamiliar voice at the table was an IT Security Analyst, facing a common challenge in the modern day business, getting the project implemented, while ensuring the right security controls are in place.
Author: Stewart Allen
One of the biggest challenges in any system design effort is to produce a viable design that is well thought-out with all of the pieces and parts working harmoniously together. If something is forgotten, regardless of its seeming insignificance, it will undoubtedly cause costly problems later on. The task, therefore, is to produce a design that is demonstratively correct.
In a nutshell, the concept of "stepwise refinement" is to take an object and move it from a general perspective to a precise level of detail. Architects have used such an approach for years, as have engineers building products. But to do so, they realized they cannot simply go from the general to the specific in one felled swoop, but instead, in increments (steps). The number of steps needed to decompose an object into sufficient detail is ultimately based on the inherent nature of the object. To illustrate, for architects designing a building, the typical steps include:
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