Select Page

Category: Musings of a Mad BA

Articles, How-To Videos, and Course Previews

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.

A Superman Suit Combats COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Syndrome

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...

read more

Business Analysts are Critical to Restarting the Economy

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...

read more

You Don’t Need ADD to Be a Business Analyst, but It Helps

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...

read more

Business Analysis is a Corporate Colonoscopy

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...

read more

Do You Still Need Business Analysts Today?

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...

read more

Does Agile or Lean Really Eliminate Business Analysts?

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...

read more

Getting to Lean Requirements – a Preamble

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...

read more

Do Your User Requirements Suffer from GIGO?

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...

read more

You Might Be a Business Analyst . . .

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!

read more
Blog Categories

Pin It on Pinterest