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...

Data is crucial in making sound business decisions, and business owners can acquire this much-needed data through business analysis. For example, Microsoft’s data analytics to help move 1,200 employees from five buildings to four resulted in a 46% reduction in meeting travel, saving the company an estimated $520,000 annually in employee ti...

As a Business Analyst we might need to work on Projects related to multiple industries and domains during our career. It is critical that we try to leverage our past knowledge and experience to learn and adapt to new industries or domains as we progress in our career. At the same time, it is equally important to unlearn things which might hinder th...

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..

In this article, we are going to categorize the techniques into three categories based on their complexity levels. Low complexity techniques are more useful for ECBA aspirants. Medium and high complex ones are more important for CBAP examination aspirants. High complexity techniques would require CBAP practitioners more time and effort to understand and be comfortable with.

Being “data-driven” doesn’t help create project success; being evidence-based does.  Evidence-based problem solving reduces the risk of blind spots and confirmation bias and increases the chances of achieving the desired outcomes. In high-stakes projects, risks can be dramatically reduced when a business analyst is willing to apply first principles thinking, hypothesis testing, and information value analysis to integrate the best evidence into the decision-making process.

Collaboration is not about resolving conflict. It is about surfacing team members’ alternate opinions or their concerns with the overall groups’ decisions. And it also does not mean that everybody must be happy with the final decision. Everyone should understand what the decision is, why the choice was made, and have a very good feeling that all aspects of the issue, both pro and con, were given adequate discussion. In other words, once a decision is made everyone should be in agreement that they are behind the decision and will work to make the decision successful. Collaboration is achieved and group think is avoided when every person voices their view of the issue and is allowed to retain their personal view even when the final decision or conclusion varies from that view.

The right approaches and tools can help business analysts perform the appropriate evaluation to help businesses improve operations, revenue, and decision-making. What are the common methods business analysts use to evaluate organizations? How do the SWOT and PESTLE methods work? What approach works best for analyzing a firm’s mission and objectives? Are there methods that can analyze how the environment can impact a business? This article explores the various methods business or data analysts use to evaluate enterprises and discusses how each method works as a business analysis tool.

There really is a podcast for everything these days, and that includes business analysis. It's worth your time finding a podcast that suits you, as you can listen in your down time and stay up to date on everything that's going on. Here are some of the best episodes out there that you should be listening to right now. How To Ace Y...

A classification field allows the recording of a meaningful fact about a record instance, with that fact drawn from a pre-established set of values. Online access to values applicable to a given instance might be through a drop-down or pop-up list, or as labelled check boxes or radio buttons. The organization may be interested in just the values, or there may be additional information about each value that the system needs to manage.