Advance Your Business Analysis Career
From the category archives:
Our business analyst community needs your help! We receive questions from new, potential, and experienced business analysts nearly every day. People have questions about skills, jobs, responsibilities, and next steps to advance their career. This series opens up Bridging the Gap as a forum to help other business analysts and a platform for you to share your expertise.
See a question below that you can answer? Please take a few minutes to drop in a comment.
Have your own question? Ask a business analyst and receive input from the Bridging the Gap community.
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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We have two readers ask similar questions of our Help A BA! staff concerning extracting business rules from legacy systems; so let’s help them both out. Reader 1: As rules are mostly hardcoded and code walkthrough is too time consuming in mainframe systems, what is the best way to extract business rules from legacy systems [...]
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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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Michelle asks: Could you provide tips to not appear ‘meek’ in interviews and during your first days on the job? When I start a new job I’m usually quiet while I listen and gather information. I am called a sunny person because I smile and talk positively around everyone. So, the context is from other [...]
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A reader asks: In order to elicit and elaborate requirements, communicate, facilitate, negotiate, present, etc., is there an advantage to being introverted or extroverted in personality? Michelle’s answer: What a great question and honestly I believe that you can find advantages for both personalities when you are a BA. As with all people, everyone reacts [...]
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A participant of the course, Crafting Better Requirements, that I’m teaching at the My Business Analysis Career platform asks: We run into situations where the business users want provide the design of the solution besides the business requirements. The technical team is against it — they would prefer to be responsible for the design phase. [...]
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Reader’s question: I need some help in documenting my BA experience for the CBAP requirements, i.e. total 7500 hrs exp, 900 hrs exp. in any 4 knowledge areas of the BABOK, the 21 PD hours and 2 references…how do I prepare this document for applying for the exam? Aaron’s response: Fortunately for those interested in [...]
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A reader asks: Recently, I attended an interview where the interviewer asked me the questions below… Could you throw some light on how to handle these kinds of questions? Why do you want to become a BA ? If given an opportunity, what is the one aspect you wish to change in BA ? What [...]
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Reader question: My past 25 years of work experience has been in the not-for-profit sector, in both program work as well as various IT roles. A part of this work that I have enjoyed very much is when I have had the opportunity to help the organization I was working for to improve its processes [...]
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Reader’s question: Can you share your list of free webinars that offer PDs? Aaron’s reply: As any good Business Analyst would do, let’s make sure we are talking about the same thing. PDs is the abbreviation for Professional Development hours, of which you need 21 to qualify to sit for the CCBATM or CBAP® exam. [...]
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