Advance Your Business Analysis Career
From the category archives:
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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The User Story: simple and elegant. “As a ______, I want to _________, so that I can __________.” Why must a user story only be used for Agile projects? I was at a seminar recently where the speaker kept talking about user stories only in the context of an agile project. Is there a thought [...]
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If you know even a little about Agile, you’ll have heard of the idea of using index cards for managing requirements. It might seem like a trivial concept, but I’ve had some unexpected successes with index cards recently, so I thought I’d share them with you. The concept Here’s the concept. Now, brace yourselves, because [...]
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The agile methodology is utilized for software development. This method works very well for this type of project. I have seen it used in system development and it can work well there too. My question is – can it work for a business process re-engineering project? The traditional waterfall approach works very well for this kind of [...]
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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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So here’s a topic that you don’t see discussed very often. Document version numbers might seem like a trivial concept – a subject upon which there is little to be said – but they are a real bug bear for me. Let me explain why. The Problem Most people tend to use the following version [...]
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In the cool logical realm of technology, we find no shortage of passionate “movements” that take on the fervor of religious wars or fanatical political ideologies. Mac vs PC was the big brawl back in the 80′s. Then it was Java vs Microsoft. And then we had the web browser wars. And then the Human [...]
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In my previous post I described my experience as a business analyst on an agile project. One of the key artifacts I produced on the project was the functional specification (FS). In this post I’m going to get right under the covers of the FS and explain exactly what it was and how it worked. My intention [...]
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Politics is a tricky business. When I think of a politician I am reminded of a cowboy trying to herd cattle – they know where they want to take everyone, it’s just rather hard to get everyone to go in their chosen direction. Blood, sweat and tears are involved in the dusty world of influencing [...]
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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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