From the category archives:

Requirements Planning and Management

The requirements process takes careful planning and management. Requirements management plans and requirements management tools can help the business analyst ensure no part of the analysis is left incomplete.

BA Stories: The Value of Reusable Requirements (BABOK 4.3)

by Laura Brandenburg on January 9, 2012 · 10 comments

in BA Stories,Requirements Planning and Management

When I first started my consulting business just over 3 years ago, I intended to focus solely on understanding the capabilities of legacy systems. Unearthing requirements had become a bit of a pet passion of mine and I realized that in every BA role I’d had in years prior, I was always trying to find [...]

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The Power of Index Cards

by Tony Heap on December 22, 2011 · 8 comments

in Agile BA Practices,Requirements Planning and Management

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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BA Stories: The BABOK might not be a methodology, but the BA still needs one (BABOK 2.1)

by Laura Brandenburg on October 31, 2011 · 6 comments

in BA Stories,Business Analysis Planning,Maturing your BA Practice,Requirements Planning and Management

After 4 weeks of meandering our way through the BABOK, we finally begin at the beginning. This is not to promise, however, that we’ll take it sequentially from here. I think there is great value in pulling the tasks out individually and looking at them out of the BABOK context. While the knowledge areas hold [...]

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How to avoid project land mines

by Adrian Reed on October 5, 2011 · 7 comments

in Creating alignment,Engaging Project Leaders,Requirements Planning and Management

As a BA, joining a project that has been in force for some time can be challenging.  There are normally a whole host of previous decisions that have been made, and it’s likely that key members of the project team will have already formed a working relationship with each other.  You might not know the [...]

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Help a BA! Are Best Practices Really Best?

by Kent McDonald on September 28, 2011 · 4 comments

in Help a BA,Maturing your BA Practice,Requirements Planning and Management

Reader Question: Is the term “best practice” a misleading buzzword? A current process is normally referred to as “best practice” until analysis is done to identify a new “best practice.” So was the former process not the “best practice” at all and can you reach a point of diminishing returns on the analysis/improvements that could [...]

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How to Manage Change Requests

by Michelle Swoboda on September 21, 2011 · 2 comments

in Business process,Requirements Planning and Management

In my last post about getting sign-off on requirements, a reader asked if I had a sample change request template that I could share.  We thought this would be a good topic for another post, so here we go! Implications of change During a project, if there is a change in scope that will impact [...]

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Help a BA! How Do I Get Sign Off on Requirements?

by Michelle Swoboda on August 17, 2011 · 34 comments

in Help a BA,Requirements Planning and Management,Requirements Validation

A reader asks: How do I get sign off on requirements? Michelle’s answer: While gathering requirements is critical to the project, validating them with stakeholders is also critical.  There are two times during each project when I ask for sign off on the requirements from the business.  The first is when the business requirements document [...]

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How to Avoid Issues by Using Your Radar Effectively

by Adrian Reed on June 1, 2011 · 6 comments

in Problem Solving,Requirements Planning and Management

Often within projects, people talk about specific risks or issues being “on their radar”.  This normally means that they are aware of the risk or issue, are tracking it, but have made a conscious decision not to take any immediate action.  On large and complex projects it can become increasingly challenging to keep track of [...]

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How can a BA use lists to be really effective?

by Eric Provost on May 5, 2011 · 4 comments

in Communication,Requirements Planning and Management

Being a BA means working in various teams, on multiple projects at the same time, with a lot of thoughts and ideas popping in your mind all over the day. Dealing with so much information is not easy; transforming this information into actionable and usable data is even more complicated. Lately, many bloggers are praising [...]

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How to add value to a project using smart knowledge sharing strategies (Part II)

by Adriana Beal on March 17, 2011 · 5 comments

in Communication,Maturing your BA Practice,Requirements Planning and Management

In How to add value to a project using smart knowledge sharing strategies (Part I), we discussed the many reasons for having up-to-date system information available for business and technical stakeholders in order to avoid a dependency created when only the BA is capable of answering questions about software behavior and other project details. In [...]

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