From the category archives:

Managing Technology

Explore the larger world of software development organizations, project portfolios and the tools, the roles, and the teams that develop great software.

Building a better business analysis practice

March 3, 2010 by Adriana Beal

John Davis writes:
We’ve been looking at IAG’s BA Benchmark 2009 that deals with the impact of poor requirements practices on project and organisational success. Short of hiring a company such as IAG, how can we as BAs best help our organisation – or a client organisation for those of us in IT Services – develop [...]

3 comments Read more

Managing chaotic situations by building “the list”

November 18, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

I’ve been receiving a lot of emails lately asking for my help from business analysts in rather chaotic environments. Sometimes these BAs have good formal training, so they know how things *should* work and are dismayed at how things actually work in their organization. Oftentimes they shoot down the path of their first project with [...]

8 comments Read more

A project manager’s view into the business analyst role [guest post] [book excerpt]

July 22, 2009 by David Wright

Laura’s note: Have you ever wondered exactly how a project or IT manager views your activities as a business analyst and why they ask you the questions they do? David Wright recently published Cascade, a book about delivery successful IT projects, especially in a multi-project environment. After spending 25 years in various IT roles and [...]

0 comments Read more

Thoughts on quality vs. speed-to-market.

July 19, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Quality is one of those terms we love and hate. We know we need it, and most of us prefer to work on projects that have “quality” in some form, but we’d be hard-pressed to provide an accurate definition in a sentence or two that provides us with a measuring stick to tell us if [...]

14 comments Read more

The myth of the “requirements contract”

June 1, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

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 here, [...]

10 comments Read more

Making it Work Between Business and IT: Overcoming Analyst Ownership to Kick-Start Collaboration [guest post]

May 27, 2009 by DougGtheBA

Whether an analyst resides on the business or IT side, he or she is ALWAYS in the middle. For a Business-side analyst to be effective, there must be an understanding of how to interact with IT and a knowledge of what is expected when requirements are turned over. The inverse is true for the IT [...]

3 comments Read more

The case for “business analysts” over combining BA with other roles

May 25, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

As a current job hunter for business analysis positions, I am a bit surprised by how many blended roles there are available.  I can hardly find a job that does not also want me to be a programmer, or a project manager, do a bit of SQL for some data analysis, or end-to-end testing. This [...]

20 comments Read more

Making the ROI case for requirements analysis

May 20, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Martin L. Shoemaker (a.k.a. The UML Guy) published a post a few weeks back with a detailed analysis calculating the ROI on requirements. Martin compares doing just enough to be “useful” but “thorough” requirements work to the “Just Start Coding” (JSC) scenario, when developers start writing code even when the problem and solution are barely [...]

1 comment Read more

What’s a business analyst’s role in IT strategy? [guest post]

April 29, 2009 by Lisa Breytspraak

One of the topics Laura and I have discussed over the last few months is how business analysts can and should be involved in IT strategic planning. So when Laura asked me to guest post on her blog, I thought this would be a great first topic.
(Note from Laura: Read my thoughts on the [...]

5 comments Read more

“Agile but” and conflicts between expectations and investments in agile implementations

April 8, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

At the March SQuAD conference, presenters put forward some fairly stringent expectations for teams to meet before claiming they were truly “agile”.  While approximately 50% of the attendees claimed to have implemented agile practices within their organization, only a handful could say they were actually creating production-ready software every two weeks.  This got me thinking, [...]

2 comments Read more

← Previous Entries