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3 Ways to Apply an Agile Mindset to Any Team
Even if your team isn’t agile, you can start applying an agile mindset to your work. Here are three ways to get started: 1) Focus on the user and customer experience. Discover and really focus on user goals. Determine what your users want or need when they interact...
Every Project is Like a New Year
January tends to be a time of optimism and anticipation for me. I like the feeling of a clean slate. It gives me the freedom to recalculate the future and set new goals. Just as we make New Year’s resolutions to get to better outcomes in our personal lives, we can...
Improve Your Requirements by Avoiding These 4 Words
There are so many things that impact the quality of our requirements. We have the ability to influence many of them, but our influence is often limited. One thing we do have control over are the words we use to describe and document (if needed) requirements. It can be...
Survival Guide: Bouncing Back And Forth Between Agile AND Waterfall
Are you bouncing back and forth between agile and waterfall? It’s quite common these days for Business Analysts to grapple with both agile and traditional approaches to requirements and development work. This can be frustrating, and Business Analysts may feel like a...
Top 6 Critical BA Skills For The Future (And Today!) – Part One
As we cruise through the last days of 2016, it’s important to peek in the rear view mirror. Reflecting on the past reveals patterns and trends in our travels that we can use to predict future destinations. When I look in my 2016 review mirror, I gather insights from...
Top Six Critical BA Skills For The Future (And Today!) – Part Two
When I wrote part one of this article series, I wanted to go deeper and have heard from many that deeper is where part 2 needs to go! You’ll see the original six critical BA skills below with additional details and questions to help your team think about how to apply...
Are You Building The Past Or The Future?
Organization leaders are always looking for ways to speed things up. I never get more than a few minutes into a conversation with a director or an executive, before they begin sharing their frustration about the slow pace of change. They don’t understand why new...
3 Spring Cleaning Tips for Your Mental Workspace
Spring has sprung here in Minnesota! After the long winter, it’s time to open the windows, air out the house and do a little spring cleaning. This burst of spring energy leads to many home projects, but it carries over into my work as well. Spring inspires me to do a...
5 High-Impact Questions Every BA Should Be Using!
Success or failure often hinges on the questions we ask throughout the project lifecycle. It sounds a bit dramatic, but I’ve witnessed it many times—a single, thought-provoking question that changed the trajectory of a conversation, opened a floodgate of new ideas, or...
FREE Agile Product Ownership eBook!
Is agile living up to the hype? Many teams want to see better agile results, but can't pinpoint the root cause of their struggles. In many cases, the missing link between "agile struggle" and "agile success" is the effectiveness of the product owner role. Download our...
3 Ways to Bring Agility into Your Requirements Practice
Most organizations are experimenting with agile. Their experiments often lead to big questions about requirements practices: Are there requirements in agile? If so, who is responsible for planning the agile requirements approach? How do elicitation techniques change?...
10 Point User Story Evaluation Quiz
Are your user stories effective? Whether you've been using user stories for years or you're just diving in, it's important to regularly reflect on the value user stories bring to your requirements and delivery process. Take a look at the questions below. If you...