Being “data-driven” doesn’t help create project success; being evidence-based does.  Evidence-based problem solving reduces the risk of blind spots and confirmation bias and increases the chances of achieving the desired outcomes. In high-stakes projects, risks can be dramatically reduced when a business analyst is willing to apply first principles thinking, hypothesis testing, and information value analysis to integrate the best evidence into the decision-making process.

Collaboration is not about resolving conflict. It is about surfacing team members’ alternate opinions or their concerns with the overall groups’ decisions. And it also does not mean that everybody must be happy with the final decision. Everyone should understand what the decision is, why the choice was made, and have a very good feeling that all aspects of the issue, both pro and con, were given adequate discussion. In other words, once a decision is made everyone should be in agreement that they are behind the decision and will work to make the decision successful. Collaboration is achieved and group think is avoided when every person voices their view of the issue and is allowed to retain their personal view even when the final decision or conclusion varies from that view.

The right approaches and tools can help business analysts perform the appropriate evaluation to help businesses improve operations, revenue, and decision-making. What are the common methods business analysts use to evaluate organizations? How do the SWOT and PESTLE methods work? What approach works best for analyzing a firm’s mission and objectives? Are there methods that can analyze how the environment can impact a business? This article explores the various methods business or data analysts use to evaluate enterprises and discusses how each method works as a business analysis tool.

There really is a podcast for everything these days, and that includes business analysis. It's worth your time finding a podcast that suits you, as you can listen in your down time and stay up to date on everything that's going on. Here are some of the best episodes out there that you should be listening to right now. How To Ace Y...

A classification field allows the recording of a meaningful fact about a record instance, with that fact drawn from a pre-established set of values. Online access to values applicable to a given instance might be through a drop-down or pop-up list, or as labelled check boxes or radio buttons. The organization may be interested in just the values, or there may be additional information about each value that the system needs to manage.

Business Analysts solve problems, but ultimately these solutions are meant to serve people, and it takes people to create the definition for these solutions. With that said, no matter how great an analyst is at discovery, analysis and solutioning, key soft skills are essential to being a best-in-class business analyst.

Soft skills are the people-side of business and really any type of engagement. There is a large variety of skills included in the soft skills category depending on which resource you read. But there are two that always seem to land in the top five.. 

I hope the above two examples give you an idea about how different the projects use agile principles based on the nature of the project. And I believe this would give you some tips if want to adjust the existing agile practice in your project too. So, the BA’s who have not worked in agile projects before, now you know how the real world agile projects are….

If you surf the internet for ‘agile project methodology”, you may get lots of web pages explaining a similar set of activities which are /should be followed in Agile projects.  Unless you have working experience in an agile project environment, you may imagine what a well-defined and smooth process the agile projects have!! 

What if you have really worked on an agile project, would you have the same perspective? Especially if you are a Business Analyst or an Iteration Manager…. ? Those BA’s and IM’s… I know what your answer is and the long explanation about your agile project experience is.. I can imagine even your annoyed faces …

Whether you’re purchasing a package (also called commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, products) as part or all of the solution for a new project or implementing a solution in the cloud, you still need requirements. Requirements let you evaluate solution candidates so that you can select the most appropriate package, and then they let you adapt the package to meet your needs.

Having discussed fields intended to name record instances, we move on to fields intended to satisfy the need to say something quantitative about a record. A quantity field requires particular attention be paid to its unit of measure (UoM) and precision. 

Sometimes the best solutions are right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. Get in the habit of working from first principles and you’ll find it easier to cut through preconceptions to change the business question and quickly see alternatives that you may have missed.

The objective of this article is to help business analysts capture functional requirements for an information system as User Stories. It discusses four levels of story. The first two levels represent business context. Levels three and four involve functional detail needed by developers and testers to deliver stories at those levels.

Where an organization opts to move into agile methodologies that help to provide quick and customized solutions, it is imperative to use a technology that supports agile workflow and application development.

There are several Frameworks and Programming Languages in the market that help in building Agile Solutions but as compared to all the available Stacks, PHP is the one that Comes up with a collection of Potential Frameworks that are actually contributing well in developing effective Application Development.

The PHP frameworks are a set of process conventions and technologies that simplify and accelerate application development and maintenance. A framework provides certain functionalities to an application through ready-made features and practices.

In this article we focus on record name fields. These fields are intended to contain a user-recognizable value by which a person or thing is known, addressed, or referred to. Unlike a record business identifier field, a name field’s value may change over time. Also, there are ‘real world’ names for things (e.g. people, cities) for which valid duplicate values can exist. 

It is more than important the modern business analyst to focus on the end to end customer experience. A BA shall act as a consultant that listen to the pains of the end users and is dedicated in solving them through providing solutions that will alleviate those pains.  How do you define a customer-centric mindset you can actually execute? Below are some elements of the customer – centricity mindset...