Helping business analysts become leaders and advance their careers.
From the category archives:
The business analyst in world of COTS projects The number COTS or Commercial-off-the-shelf-software options have increased exponentially in recent years. A sister of COTS, the “SaaS” or Software-as-a-Service where the commercial solutions are made available over the web, with no hosting or installation required, has made these solutions even easier to implement technically. This blog [...]
{ 6 comments }
We all know exactly what “assumption” stands for and how false assumptions can make those first 3 letters stand out and beat you over the head. But do you take time to clarify your assumptions? And better yet, do you validate them? False assumptions lead us …. well we know where they lead us. But, [...]
{ 7 comments }
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. [...]
{ 6 comments }
I recently picked up a favorite book to re-read it for probably the fourth or fifth time. My first reading was during my junior year in high school and my second reading shortly followed the first. Then the third a few years later. And here I am picking up an old favorite with a new [...]
{ 2 comments }
My recent post on user interface specifications created some interesting commentary on prototyping vs. specifying. From the perspective of publishing blog posts, writing about UI specs before prototyping put the cart before the horse. In normal project work prototyping or wire-framing activities actually come before any sort of user interface specification work. As Harris Lloyd-Levy [...]
{ 2 comments }
With all the hype today, you’d think this article be titled “why you need to get your self some SaaS today”. That may have been a cute title but I’d be doing my visitors a disservice. The truth is, there are pros and cons of service software models. Weighed against the options of building or [...]
{ 10 comments }
All too often we start shopping for software solutions before we know what we want or, worse yet, we create fully defined specifications (whether written or in our minds) before we start shopping. In either situation either our activities are not efficient and possibly ineffective at finding the best possible technology solution to a real [...]
{ 2 comments }
The matrix is one of the most flexible and adaptable tools in my arsenal, and thus one of my favorites for project analysis, decision-making, and presentation. Although at the core, a matrix is just a group of numbers or words, it can represent anything from survey tabulations to unit evaluation to strategic planning. One of [...]
{ 0 comments }
So when you reach that point of the project where your head simply hurts from how hard you are thinking, you’ve spent hours in meetings rehashing the same concepts, and yet you and your team members are not communicating effectively either about the problem or the solution, you most likely need to take a step [...]
{ 9 comments }
There are no “best practices” only a bunch of good practices that work best in certain contexts. Do you agree? At last week’s SQuAD conference, this theme resounded over and over and one presenter even threw out the idea that as an IT profession, we are very limited in our set of tools and techniques, [...]
{ 6 comments }
234 posts
Recently posted: Bridging the Gap eBooks available as door prizes for IIBA and professional association chapters
15 posts
Recently posted: How to become a business analyst when you have an IT background
22 posts
Recently posted: Taking care with your digital footprint
Loading ...
