I was at a talk yesterday by American artist Lawrence Weiner. He spent half the time saying there was nothing he had to say about his art; the next half saying it.  I enjoyed it thoroughly.  Something he had to say really stuck with me: that art is all about creating a logical structure for viewing the world.  It helped me understand...

Most of us would agree that recessions are not a good thing – especially the one we are in right now.   But for those daring enough, tough times have can be moments of opportunity.    Many famous companies - such as GE, CNN, HP, Microsoft, Hyatt, FedEx, etc. - started during times of shaky economic conditions. &n...

I've heard and read many opinions painting the role of the business analysts as being (or needing to be) purely business oriented.  The argument is "let the technical team deal with the technical details." The practice however, the business analyst is confronted by the technical aspects of the solution on virtually every project.  These ...

The Business Analyst will probably go down as one of the more important players to help us get out of these terrible economic times. Now is more important than ever for organizations to improve their processes and squeeze every last bit of productivity out of their business operations. Unfortunately, not all companies will survive - as they try to...

As a programmer who moved into business analysis I got most of my business analysis skills the old fashioned way: through trial and error, working on many projects, stealing from those who succeeded, learning gotchas from those who failed, etc. It was rare when I stumbled upon an experienced consultant who was willing to mento...

"The 2009 Benchmark of Salaries and Employment Trends in IT survey from the National Computing Centre says one-third of respondents have experienced a shortage of candidates with certain key skills. According to the survey, 33.7 percent of organisations highlight problems recruiting or retaining people with Oracle, SAP, .NET, web developmen...

Morphis is a company that provides currency supply chain management software and counts among its customers the U.S. Federal reserve as well as central banks, ATMs and armored car companies around the world.  Process mapping was the furthest thing from their minds when they started in business but they quickly found out that if they didn’t sta...

“Web 2.0” allows increasingly collaborative work among teams of varying roles, locales and technical abilities and facilitates the move toward the business user as "user-innovator" a la Eric von Hippel. User expectations are shaped by their experiences on the web and they demand and can manage increased control and participation in both the develop...

Have you ever had to use a map to get somewhere, and after navigating around the wilderness for hours, eventually had to ask for directions because it failed you? Alternatively, have you ever read directions to assemble a toy, and rather than help you, the directions made things much more complicated?Perhaps you just figured it out on your own, w...

In Part 1, we learned that the less precise things are, the easier it is to understand them. Thus the paradox: how do you get precise requirements and easy to understand requirements? According to the requirements gods and goddesses, there are fundamentally three levels of requirements ( you can break these down into more but that is another bl...

Have you ever had to use a map to get somewhere, and after navigating around the wilderness for hours, eventually had to ask for directions because it failed you?   Alternatively, have you ever read directions to assemble a toy, and rather than help you, the directions made things much more complicated? Perhaps you just figured it out o...

INTRODUCTION Being dropped in the middle of a project that is already in a bad shape (over budget, over schedule and under compliance) is not easy (or funny). So try to make the best of it and get out of it alive. On most cases, you get a project start with the business case or whatnot, then continue on with a chain of events. On most of my encou...

Analysts everyday and in every domain of business come across obstacles in their analysis and efforts that prevent them from best meeting the needs of the business. These obstacles can be in the form of business processes, or system limitations, or both. Furthermore, a considerably big obstacle can be potentially detrimental to the spirit and purpo...

If you are managing business or systems analysts, trying to identify the skills and competencies required of your analysts is not an easy task. The expectations placed upon the analyst vary widely from organization to organization. The variations are so drastic that the actual title doesn’t not say much about the type of work your analysts do. ...

In most of the projects and organizations I have worked for I have seen a very interesting pattern: - Developers get developer specific tools such as MS Visual Studio. - Testers get testing specific tools such as Mercury TestDirector. - Analysts get MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The more "progressive" organizations might provide their busin...