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7 Habits of Highly Effective Business Analysts
Highly effective BAs, regardless of their skill level or years of experience, consistently hone their craft. Guided by curiosity and passion, great BAs are always on the lookout for growth opportunities—ways to strengthen and sharpen their skills. This focus on...
Building Better Requirements
Strong requirements management practices remain a critical component of project success. In fact, poor requirements management is the #2 most commonly-cited reason for project failure according to "PMI's Pulse of the Profession: Requirements Management--A Core...
Evolution of the Requirements Mindset!
I have a mission! I want to change the way we "do" requirements! Instead of gathering and documenting requirements, let's help our project teams DISCOVER requirements, collaboratively! Let's promote agility and inspire leadership, innovation and creativity. Some...
Sticky Situations: How do Business Analysts Influence Ethics?
We’ve all found ourselves in sticky situations at work—those grey areas between right and wrong that really test our ethical boundaries. The nature of BA work, facilitating change and protecting stakeholder value, launches BAs into the middle of many sticky...
Get Your Requirements off to the Right Start With These 5 Steps!
It’s project kick-off time--the time when organizations transition from planning to action. New initiatives have been prioritized, dollars have been allocated and teams are being formed—everyone is ready to get to work. BAs being assigned to these projects often...
5 Lessons from Working with Agile and Waterfall Teams
Over the course of my career, I have always been intrigued by leaders who promote a specific methodology or tool or process as THE RIGHT WAY to deliver solutions. They dispense mandates and proclamations to promote their all-or-nothing, purist approach to methodology....
What's Your Secret Weapon in the Battle Against Bad Requirements?
BAs and PMs use hundreds of tools and techniques to boost the quality of their requirements practices. From simple to complex, things like brainstorming, user interviews, traceability maps, context diagrams, and detailed data models help us gather information needed...
What is Your Modeling Mindset?
Pictures are an important part of BA work. Whether you call it modeling or diagraming or mapping or drawing, the techniques BAs use to turn processes, relationships, ideas and tasks into pictures, remains a valuable technique for nearly every phase of project...
The BA Role: Has it Really Changed in the Last 15 Years?
As I tweet my latest BA adventures, I ask Siri to find the best restaurants near my hotel, Skype with friends in Mexico, and order my favorite bottles of Napa Valley wine on Amazon, I can’t help but be amazed by how much technology has saturated my life in the last 15...
Can Conference Calls be as Effective as Face-to-Face Meetings?
When I think of collaborative and innovative project meetings, the picture on the top is what floats into my mind. I see people standing in small groups. I see everyone focused, engaged and contributing. I see whiteboards, flip charts, drawings and sticky notes. But...
Virtual Requirements Meetings: Painful or Practical?
Painful! Definitely! The idea of sitting through a requirement workshop via teleconference seems like torture. Virtual requirements meetings tend to bottleneck our ability to effectively collaborate. Attendees and facilitators: dread the dead air and the anonymous...
Brainstorming: We Have Lots of Ideas, Now What?
In the world of business and technology, success stems from good ideas. Successful organizations rely on a variety of idea generation techniques to: Solve problems Identify options, needs and features Improve processes Resolve issues Create or modify products ...