From the category archives:

Leadership

Explore how to become a better business analyst by honing your capabilities as an individual leader within your organization. Business analysts lead organizations through change.

Akk! The developers won’t use my requirements specs!

March 1, 2010 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Ask not what your developers can do for you, ask what you can do for your developers.
These past few weeks I’ve been practically overtaken by a waterfall of humbling experiences. To be perfectly blunt, the developers did not like my requirements specifications. It was hard to realize that I had failed to communicate requirements in [...]

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Painful Lessons are Really Opportunities to Learn

October 7, 2009 by DougGtheBA

I’ve been collecting, consolidating and conjoining the data from several lessons learned sessions over the last year. My organization is trying to execute some trend analysis over time to see how things are going. That, however, is not what I want to write about, it’s just the trigger. When we were young kids, there was [...]

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Business analyst as a change agent [guest post]

July 8, 2009 by Yegor Filonov

It’s being discussed in several places on the net whether business analyst actually is or at least should be an internal change agent in the company. One may say, well, it depends on whether this business analyst has such an opportunity or whether his management would give him such responsibilities. It’s interesting, by the way, [...]

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Sometimes B.A. stands for Being an Ambassador [guest post]

July 1, 2009 by DougHill

How do you respond to negative energy and confrontational situations? Doug Hill tells us a beautiful story of how small gestures can have a great impact. Enjoy. – Laura
I walked into the office last week and as I turned the corner to my desk, I witnessed it.  It was the breaching of the dam, the [...]

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It doesn’t matter if you were right, resist the urge to say “I told you so”

June 22, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Business analysts tend to be detailed, thorough, and well-informed through research. It’s part of what makes us so good at helping people analyze and solve problems. But if we feel committed to letting people know when we’re right (and they are wrong) we can quickly sabotage some of our best relationships and alienate ourselves.
One way [...]

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Making it Work Between Business and IT: There’s No Such thing as Their Problem [guest post]

June 17, 2009 by DougGtheBA

The last couple of posts about the collaboration between Business and IT have revolved around the active reaching out from one side or the other to engage the other team. Much of the commentary described problems with regard to different teams communicating poorly, which resulted in poor understanding of the total picture. Resolutions to these [...]

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On big-L and small-l leadership

June 16, 2009 by Adriana Beal

Leadership doesn’t have to be about supervisory authority, big egos, or the popular myth of the hard-driving, high-living CEO. Business analysts, like other brain-powered workers, function on a knowledge-intensive environment that require a whole new form of leadership, practiced among peers, most often in teams. BAs are used to a delineation of leadership duties among [...]

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What to do when a developer tells you “that’s impossible”

May 4, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

We have all been here. You’ve defined just the right feature or solution to solve a specific business problem. It’s elegant. It’s simple. It’s even got a hint of beauty about it. When you get ready to present it to your technical team for implementation, you get the answer you least expect…”that’s impossible” or it’s [...]

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Fix yourself before you fix “the process”

March 23, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

At last week’s SQuAD conference, Danny Faught spoke about Tearing down the Ivory Tower of Testing.  As I understood it, the Ivory Tower is a box that you create around yourself or your department that essentially says, “I can’t work effectively unless….”. In response to false expectations and a fear of failing, we create processes, [...]

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What are you doing to bridge the gap between business and IT today?

February 26, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

As a technology professional, it’s critical to make incremental improvements in how you engage with the business.  You won’t go from “IT maven” to “bridging the gap” overnight, but by focusing on taking incremental steps to better engage with the business each day, over time you’ll change your style and, hopefully, how the business perceives [...]

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