Advance Your Business Analysis Career
From the category archives:
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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In my last post, Help a BA! How do I get stakeholders to focus on business requirements?, I wrote: As discussed above, it’s not only OK, but expected that the business side will be involved in defining the solution that will be built to address a business problem or opportunity. The solution requirements, which describe [...]
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I am sure that any business analyst who has written user acceptance scripting can confirm that script writing is super detailed, critically important and mind numbingly boring. But is it important – yes it is. Why you ask would something so boring be important? Well, if the business user cannot validate that the new business [...]
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When I began my latest consulting job, one of my first deliverables was to assist the stakeholders with a process walk through. The purpose of the walk through was to identify gaps in the ‘to” be process. This was one way of determining if there were gaps because all teams were in new positions, the [...]
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Please indulge this second diversion into the world of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Although this book really has nothing to do with business analysis, it has everything to do with how we approach technology and as I read it I keep seeing our profession in a new light. In the [...]
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Today we meet with David Brandenburg, an enterprise architect with 15 years of experience in various technology roles. David is also my fiancee, but we cast aside our wedding planning talk to discuss the interrelationships between our respective fields in enterprise architecture and business analysis. David helps us see how new technologies can enable fancier [...]
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I know you have shared this experience with me. You are running a meeting, probably about software requirements for some project, and someone in the room gets squirmy. Maybe they are shuffling their papers. Maybe they are bored and checking their emails. Or maybe they are restless and start finishing your sentences and communicating with [...]
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A few weeks ago, I posted about how to validate requirements without a formal, tedious, requirements walk-through. Alex Papworth followed up with an interesting comment and question: There is a point when you need commitment or signoff from stakeholders. This is necessary when estimates are provided and requirements need to be frozen (not talking Agile [...]
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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 [...]
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A few months ago I posted about how requirements walk-throughs are a necessity in any good requirements development process. I’m here today to tell you I’ve changed my opinion. It’s not that walk-throughs lack value. They definitely do. But the timing, scope, and methods of these reviews might need to be reconsidered. A structured requirements [...]
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