Between You and Your Business Analysis Career
From the category archives:
Do you consider all the implications of your projects? As business analysts, we are often most comfortable thinking about what happens if we’re “on spec.” After all, specifying a future state of affairs is a big part of what we do. Given that, do we think enough about what happens if our projects fail, succeed, [...]
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I’ve been receiving a lot of emails lately asking for my help from business analysts in rather chaotic environments. Sometimes these BAs have good formal training, so they know how things *should* work and are dismayed at how things actually work in their organization. Oftentimes they shoot down the path of their first project with [...]
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Susan Penny Brown is a thirty-year veteran of the software industry, with expertise in IT strategy and complex enterprise applications. She spent the first 20 years of her career in high-profile Silicon Valley firms, both highly successful and abysmal failures. Susan established Interim Technical Management, Inc. in 1998 when she relocated to the Denver area. [...]
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Recently a fellow BA asked this question in the IIBA(R) LinkedIn forum: “If a project is approved, do I still need to do enterprise analysis as defined in the BABOK? Do I need to do a business case?” He received several timely and insightful responses, so it is worth reading the entire chain. This question [...]
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Perfectionism: the good and the bad Although we never even might admit it to a trusted colleague, we business analysts can get caught up in our own ideas of what the system should do and how the end result should look, oftentimes holding on to our concept well beyond when it’s rational to do so. [...]
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Quality is one of those terms we love and hate. We know we need it, and most of us prefer to work on projects that have “quality” in some form, but we’d be hard-pressed to provide an accurate definition in a sentence or two that provides us with a measuring stick to tell us if [...]
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Social media and the customer As social media outlets such as Twitter have recently hit mainstream, a lot of attention has been given to using these new marketing channels for staying informed or finding new ways to send messages to people. But social media is much more powerful than most of what we’re hearing–it enables [...]
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The agile/SCRUM product owner (PO) is one of the most multi-faceted roles in technology methodologies today. Within a project, the PO is central in making the decisions and providing the details that keep the project team moving forward efficiently. And, of course, we’re not just interested in moving forward efficiently, but moving forward toward a [...]
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Over the past week and a half, I’ve been to 4 dress shops and tried on at least 50 wedding dresses. Being in the position of unenlightened consumer, working my way through a purchase I have never made before and will never (knock on wood) make again, and really not sure what I wanted but [...]
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I’ve often found that the best requirements don’t always present themselves when expected or desired….you might schedule a full blown elicitation session or executive panel, but very likely someone is going to stop by your desk the day before (or after) the meeting with a great idea. And they will want you to listen, respond, [...]
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