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The agile movement promotes positive change when it encourages teams to work together to create products that are fit for purpose with as little non-value-added activities as possible. Agile approaches embrace mechanisms for continuous improvement, and include practices that can be traced to Lean thinking, a management philosophy that aims to identify what creates value [...]
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Both here at Bridging the Gap and other BA forums, a question that is constantly asked, mainly by aspiring and new BAs is, “Do you have a template to share?” My temptation, when I get one of these questions, is to send the person to Let Me Google That For You. (Because, really, how difficult can [...]
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Even though the Agile Manifesto recently completed 10 years, there are still some lingering misconceptions about the agile approach within the BA community. In this post I’d like to address two points that are often overlooked by business analysts when they discuss agile methods: 1. Waterfall is not the only alternative to agile This is [...]
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In my last post, Help a BA! How do I get stakeholders to focus on business requirements?, I wrote: As discussed above, it’s not only OK, but expected that the business side will be involved in defining the solution that will be built to address a business problem or opportunity. The solution requirements, which describe [...]
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A participant of the course, Crafting Better Requirements, that I’m teaching at the My Business Analysis Career platform asks: We run into situations where the business users want provide the design of the solution besides the business requirements. The technical team is against it — they would prefer to be responsible for the design phase. [...]
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If you are a BA working on the IT space, you may be responsible for creating multiple deliverables, many of them intermediate documents such as meeting minutes and as-is/to be business models. You may also be in charge of producing important and high-visibility requirements specifications such as a Vision document describing the application in general [...]
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Many books and articles describe the characteristics of good requirements and offer templates for requirements documents, but as we all know, applying such knowledge in real-life projects requires more than looking at concepts and examples in a book. In a blog post for TechRepublic,”10 things you should know about hiring a business or systems analyst” [...]
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In How to add value to a project using smart knowledge sharing strategies (Part I), we discussed the many reasons for having up-to-date system information available for business and technical stakeholders in order to avoid a dependency created when only the BA is capable of answering questions about software behavior and other project details. In [...]
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Is there value in keeping system documentation up-do-date? Keeping system documentation up-to-date is a challenge faced by many business analysts. In discussion forums, it is common for this concern to be raised in questions such as, “How do you avoid the problem of having only one or two BAs with full understanding and latest information [...]
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Considering the benefits that a disciplined approach to business analysis can bring to organizations, it is hard to understand why so few of them spend the time and effort necessary to establish performance objectives for the BA work, and to develop a solid performance measurement system to monitor progress toward those objectives. Organizations that push [...]
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356 posts
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Recently posted: The Power of Index Cards
