Getting into the mind of an experienced business analyst can be frightening, but someone has to experience it. You will find serious and off-the-wall philosophies, humor, and strange ideas related to the field from one who has been there – and lived to tell about it (one of the authors of this blog – Tom Hathaway). As a disclaimer, all of the posts in this category represent the opinions of the author and are in no way, shape, or form meant to offer intelligent guidance to future business analysts or anyone else who defines future digital solutions.
Apr 30, 2020
Work Time and Playtime COVID-19 has many of you trying to do Business Analysis from your couch, your basement, or (if you have the luxury) your home office. Life has changed dramatically in the last month because of COVID-19, and many are trying to cope with...
Apr 15, 2020
As a result of the COVID19 pandemic, global business hit a roadblock that was as unpredictable as it was inevitable. However, given human ingenuity, roadblocks are not eternal. It takes patience and hard work, but somehow, we always manage to find a way to get past...
Apr 10, 2020
YES, There Will Be Life After COVID-19! No question, COVID-19 is deadly. The toll it takes in human lives is unknowable. How much damage it will do to individual countries and to the global economy is anyone’s guess. To modernize Thomas Paine’s quote from 1776, “These...
Dec 17, 2019
If you are a business analyst, do you ever get the feeling that stakeholders avoid you? As you are walking around the building, do you see developers avoiding eye contact? Worse yet, do you notice testers actively making detours that take them on a path that will...
Dec 10, 2019
A lot of people seem to think that the always-on Internet has a detrimental effect for those of us who suffer Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). I was officially diagnosed with ADD at the age of 49 but I had it all my life. Wellllll . . ., maybe not ALL my life, since...
Nov 19, 2019
I called a Subject Matter Expert recently to schedule a meeting to discuss her business requirements for a new product. She replied that she was about as excited about that meeting as she was about scheduling an invasive, minor medical procedure she needed since she...
Nov 28, 2018
Does your organization depend on working software? If you are doing business in the 21st century, the answer is probably an emphatic "DUH"! Which organizations actually need specialists on the software development team, such as a Requirements Engineer who has a tight...
Sep 28, 2018
I recently read the blog post The End Is Near For Business Analysts In Agile! by Michael Boris. Although I am fundamentally in agreement with several of his points, I believe there is room for clarification. Does Your Organization Need Business Analysts or Business...
May 1, 2018
How Do You Decide? Requirements are fundamentally a tool for simplifying future decisions. They pose either hard ("must have") or soft ("might have") limits on future decisions that you or someone else has to make. Anytime you want to build (or buy) just about...
Jan 28, 2014
I recently recognized that we who wear the Business Analysis hat are actually in the garbage business. This may sound controversial on the face of it, but let me explain. Early pioneers of information technology experienced an obvious epiphany when they expressed the...
Jan 14, 2014
You can benefit from business analysis skills regardless of your profession or personal situation. Five hard-core BA techniques that you can easily adopt in your private life.
Nov 27, 2012
What is business analysis about and why do we need more people involved in it?
Jun 5, 2011
How much does a business analyst have to know about the subject matter to be effective? The answer is surprisingly little – assuming the business analyst knows how to do business analysis.
Mar 12, 2011
Do You Really Want To Elicit IT Requirements? It is time for me to enlighten the rest of the world regarding IT requirements elicitation. First off, I consider it somewhat of a dangerous term, elicitation. I am afraid to ask other stakeholders on the project that I...
Nov 19, 2009
How many of you out there are doing the kinds of things that typical business analysts do, but do not have the title? You may be a business analyst and not even know it!
Jul 22, 2009
Is Outsourcing Business Analysis a Bad Idea? A couple of years ago, I attempted a poem entitled To Be a BA or to Buy a BA. Of course, just to make the question sound challenging, I — in my infinite geekdom — plagiarized Will Shakespeare’s "To Be or...
May 27, 2009
So how much is it worth to make fewer errors? Research has shown that the cost to find and fix a requirements error in production . . .
Jan 9, 2008
To be effective, business and stakeholder requirements need to contain minimal ambiguity and subjectiveiy. Misunderstood requiremetns are one of the major cuases of IT project failures.