Here are six more practices that, again, virtually every project will find valuable. These are adapted from our book, Software Requirements Essentials: Core Practices for Successful Business Analysis.

Do you have to do them? Of course not—that’s your choice. The requirements police won’t hunt you down if you don’t. But if you know of any projects that won’t find at least five of them valuable, please let us know. We’ll notify the Guinness World Records people.

BABoK v3 techniques are a lot. There are not just 10, 20, or 30 techniques but 50 techniques, to be precise and that's not a small number!

The human mind can remember 5 to 7 elements at a time and anything more than that is hard to remember.

Then, how can one remember 50 techniques?

"Is it really possible to have a BABoK Techniques Mindmap?"

Many of you may wonder.

So, here's the Ultimate BABoK techniques mindmap which could save you 40 hours of your International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) exam preparation!

An information system maintains data in fields within records. Equally important is the system’s ability to navigate between records. Parts 5 thru 9 of this series discussed fundamental business data field types. This article discusses a record navigation field. These fields do not themselves contain business data, but support the system’s ability to navigate from a given record instance to business data in related record instances.

Informed business analysts know that one of the secrets to producing a high-quality process model is to establish a clear mission for each model. To be successful, you should mindfully establish the mission of your next process model within the business process management, information technology, or regulatory compliance project that the model will serve.  You will then tailor your elicitations of the model’s content and configuration to meet project needs. Part of your process model mission-setting elicitation agenda will include asking and answering this important question: What is this model’s required degree of abstraction?

The following four attributes are really important for a leader (and for a parent)... You will see that parents who do all the above turn out to have decent children (more often than not) and leaders who do all the above turn out to be highly respected and admired leaders. You can pick your favorite leader you had in your life and you will notice they displayed these qualities.

Product Owners and Managers can now prioritize based on impact to the governance and transparency of their company, the environmental impact the solution will have, and even the social impacts on their company and the world.

Sometimes it may be difficult as a user story should not at first have a solution in mind, but as with some of the examples below, there can be known impacts up front, and you can always feel free to update the “impact” statement once a solution and requirements are identified.

People sometimes ask me, “What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about software development in all that time?” Here it is, lesson #4 of the 60 lessons in my book Software Development Pearls: A usage-centric approach to requirements and design will meet customer needs better than a feature-centric approach.  Let me describe why I believe this is such an important principle.

It's tough to predict the future and same goes towards predicting business trends with certainty. But we can always predict areas which are likely to be of prominence with a fair amount of certainty.  As we all know business analysis is a profession growing at a fast pace and will continue to see this trend of growth for at least next 10 years. If you are a proactive business analyst you must keep watch on the trending topics to stay ahead of the curve and be a futuristic leader.  Here are our top 6 picks for business analysts to watch out in 2023...

This thought recently popped into my mind when someone asked me what template to follow when writing a user story. Perhaps you have encountered or asked this question before. As a Business Analyst, I want to use a template to write a user story, so that, my team will understand the requirements.  Do formats and templates really matter?

It’s no longer rare to see machine learning (ML) models used to support a variety of business decisions, from whether a financial transaction should be sent to the fraud investigation team, to what discount a distributor should get.

Still, even in organizations that have embraced ML-based systems, it’s common for business problems that could benefit from machine learning to be solved using a less effective (and often more costly) approach. 

As a business analyst, it’s useful to be aware of some signs your business problem might benefit from ML...

Rather than building systems in house, many organizations outsource development to contract development companies. They might outsource the work to take advantage of skills they do not have available in-house, to augment their internal staff, or in an attempt to save money or time. The outsourced development supplier could be located physically nearby, on the other side of the world, or anywhere in between.  The role of a business analyst is even more important on these projects than on a co-located project. If the team members are all in one location, developers can walk down the hall to ask the BA a question or to demonstrate newly developed functionality. This close collaboration can’t happen in the same way with outsourced development. Compared to in-house development, outsourced—and particularly offshore—projects face requirements-related challenges...

A point in time field supports a business need for an information system to know when an event took place (or will take place). Date, Time, and Date/Time field values represent a quantity of time involving a specific unit of measure and precision. Like other quantity values, they can participate in calculations (E.g. subtracting one date from another to determine the number of days in-between).

As a business analyst/project manager/scrum master, one needs to use their leadership skills and influencing ability to balance between the stakeholder’s expectation and the project goals hand in hand.  Here is a typical stakeholder interaction chart for a business analyst..