Between You and Your Business Analysis Career
From the category archives:
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. [...]
{ 8 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 [...]
{ 18 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 [...]
{ 11 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 }
Once you’ve interviewed subject matter experts to understand their business processes and how they use the functionality provided by the system, you’ll most likely be sitting in a state of “information overload.” Trust that this is part of the process of gaining a comprehensive understanding of the system and start working towards creating your end [...]
{ 3 comments }
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had an interesting experience getting into a bi-weekly rhythm of requirements elicitation, definition, and reviews. Based on this experience, I’m convinced that a fundamental challenge for the agile product owner or business analyst is to maintain and communicate the “big picture” while also detailing out requirements in very small, [...]
{ 3 comments }
382 posts
Recently posted: The Shocking Truth About Aspiring Business Analysts
3 posts
Recently posted: How to Start a Business Analyst Career eBook – now available on Kindle and Nook!
22 posts
Recently posted: How to avoid 7 common workshop pitfalls
35 posts
Recently posted: Dipping My Toes in Ice Water: a Story of Perseverance
23 posts
Recently posted: 4 Self-Confidence Secrets Every Business Analyst Should Know
13 posts
Recently posted: The Virtual BA: Video Conference Self-Awareness
9 posts
Recently posted: The Future of Business Analysis: Innovation and Creativity
6 posts
Recently posted: To technology or not to technology
8 posts
Recently posted: The Power of Index Cards
