From the category archives:

Engaging Project Leaders

Your lack of planning does not constitute my emergency

by Laura Brandenburg on January 11, 2012 · 5 comments

in Engaging Project Leaders

One day last fall I had a typical BA moment. I received a call, before I’d even had a sip of my morning coffee or opened my email, that came in with a sense of urgency. I was helping an organization interview BAs for a job opening. There was a job interview scheduled for about [...]

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Stop the project plan crash. You are the expert.

by Adrian Reed on December 7, 2011 · 16 comments

in Engaging Project Leaders,Roles and Responsibilities,Stakeholder Analysis

Imagine the scene.  It’s 22:30, and an aircraft is preparing to take off for a long haul flight. In the cockpit, the captain and first officer are busy carrying out their final pre-flight checks.  They check the weather, the fuel levels and a whole range of technical dials and indicators.  They start to map out [...]

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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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The best methodology is freedom

by Nik Gebhard on June 16, 2011 · 18 comments

in Engaging Project Leaders,Maturing your BA Practice,Problem Solving

There have been bounteous discussions around the need for new life to be breathed into business analysis methodologies. I have chosen to stay away from the agile versus scrum versus waterfall versus iterative versus I-don’t-care debate. I was always of the opinion that these discussions were intuitive and unnecessary. I was wrong. Business is changing. [...]

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The link between stakeholder relationships and project planning

by Nik Gebhard on May 19, 2011 · 2 comments

in Engaging IT,Engaging Project Leaders,Engaging the Business

During the past few days my curiosity-muscle has been tickled by the dormant value that resides in understanding stakeholder backgrounds early on in a project. Of particular interest is how this relates back to project timeline estimations and planning. “How?” you ask. Allow me to explain… I wouldn’t expect much “umming and ahhing” if I [...]

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Jen Fox teaches you how to avoid being micro-managed by managing up

by Laura Brandenburg on February 11, 2011 · 1 comment

in Engaging Project Leaders,Marketing your value

Last week Jen Fox posted a great story on managing up. Managing up is the key to not being micro-managed, something BAs detest more than most (though of course, no one likes it). Here are a few quotes from the article: Managing up is a form of visibility, or presence. As workplaces and teams span [...]

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Attending the right meetings and avoiding unnecessary ones

by Steve Blais on July 12, 2010 · 5 comments

in Effective Meetings,Engaging Project Leaders

Anne, a young business analyst for a financial company in New York, arrived late for the meeting.  I had been at the company for two days of a week long engagement and had been attending meetings most of the time.  This was the third meeting that Anne and I both attended and the third time [...]

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How to successfully sell your initiatives to your boss

by Adriana Beal on July 7, 2010 · 9 comments

in Engaging Project Leaders,Marketing your value

In my previous article for Bridging the Gap, I wrote about the importance of right-sizing your initiatives to get beyond a career plateau as a business analyst. A reader left a comment saying, “if your management listens, you can think about taking initiative, else, its just a waste of time and energy”. That comment made [...]

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