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..

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.