Helping business analysts become leaders and advance their careers.
From the category archives:
In this previous article I started to answer an excellent question posed by John Davis: Short of hiring a company such as IAG, how can we as BAs best help our organisation – or a client organisation for those of us in IT Services – develop more maturity in requirements definition and management? In that [...]
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If you’ve been a BA for any period of time, I’m sure you’ve heard this complaint. Requirements take too long. Why don’t we just start coding? I’ve worked in several informal environments where the business analysts are in a constant fight to earn a bit of respect for the process and the analysis that goes [...]
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When I first started working on an agile team, one of the habits I needed to develop was grooming the product backlog. In an agile environment my week-to-week and day-to-day focus quickly became more integrated with what the development team was working on each sprint. If I went into a sprint planning session without a [...]
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John Simpson is director of customer outreach and marketing at Jama Software. John is a contributor for Business Analyst Times. At Jama, he represents the voice of the customer in their product strategy and communications. He has over 14 years experience working at software technology companies including Microsoft, WebTrends and Omniture. In his spare time, [...]
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In my recent post on requirements templates, I found that many of you fall into two very different camps. While some of you have formalized processes and sets of documentation requirements for your software projects (this can be helpful or hurtful), others have nothing. Those of you in the latter category feel you need to [...]
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At last week’s SQuAD conference, Danny Faught spoke about Tearing down the Ivory Tower of Testing. As I understood it, the Ivory Tower is a box that you create around yourself or your department that essentially says, “I can’t work effectively unless….”. In response to false expectations and a fear of failing, we create processes, [...]
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I’ve begun to question the whiz bang method with which most new IT strategies are laid out. Surely, we’ve spent time understanding the business needs and developing an ideal future architecture, but when it comes time to communicate this with the business team (who needs to buy-in and possibly fund it) and the technology team [...]
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By now you are probably ready to start meeting with stakeholders to elicit requirements. You’ve found a business sponsor, scoped your project, and learned a lot exploring the system. It’s valuable to pause and create a plan of attack before diving into your stakeholder meetings. Having a plan will keep you organized and make the [...]
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Being a leader within your organization requires a consistent commitment to results and continuous improvement. It’s also about establishing transparency into what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how your activities drive value within your organization. A solid requirements management plan can help you achieve many of these leadership goals. Although I’m [...]
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If you are given license to start reverse engineering a legacy system into requirements, also known as a “current capabilities assessment”, it’s often tempting to jump right in and start documenting. But before you do that it’s important to lay the groundwork for your task. You’ll want to identify a business owner and define scope [...]
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