Entries for the 'Project Management' Category

» X-Gap: Using Strategic Planning to Close the Project Execution "Gap"

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Teams and organizations are constantly plagued by project execution errors and failures. These failures create an execution gap -- a gap between what an individual and/or team plans to do and what they actually do instead. Just as retention rapidly degrades after learning, so does project execution after strategic planning. So what can be done? In...

Posted by: James D. Murphy

» Collaborative Leadership: A Process for Success in a Turbulent World

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Do you know how to provide collaborative leadership in a disciplined fashion? And how does one define disciplined collaboration? The current business and leadership literature touts the importance of collaborating in our turbulent world. Large and small businesses and teams struggle to wrap their heads around just what collaboration is. Many see co...

Posted by: James D. Murphy

» The Red Team: A Simple But Effective Method to Improve Mission Planning

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The May 1, 2011 mission to find Osama Bin Laden has become one of the most celebrated military mission planning successes in recent memory due to the utilization of a little-known and seldom-used practice called the Red Team. The mission was a daring raid executed by the courageous members of the U.S. Navy SEAL DEVGRU, also known as SEAL Team Six,...

Posted by: James D. Murphy

» Upside down Procedures and Processes

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Are we looking at it all wrong? Do you ever get the feeling that you are seeing something very different than the other guy? I don’t just mean the glass half full/empty outlook on life, but fundamentally are we looking at things the wrong way? I sometimes get that feeling when dealing with projects that involve processes, and all my projects are...

Posted by: Mike Cunningham

» Complexity: The Execution Challenge You Don't See

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When you think of the word 'complex', do you ever think about what it has to do with project execution? Ask a management consulting firm to define 'complex' and you'll get a response like "well, it's a concept that can affect your life, your family, your team and your organization." That's because consultants understand that complexity lies in ever...

Posted by: James D. Murphy

» Five New Year’s Resolutions for Requirements

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It’s that time of year, where our thoughts turn to the holidays…the holiday parties, the shopping, the lights, visiting with family! For many organizations, the end of the year tends to be quiet on the IT front, for no organization wants to risk introducing problems into their production environment at year end. So as I look back at th...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Is Traceability Possible Without a Requirements Tool?

(2004 Views) (1 Comments)

I have spent the last year and a half working on an enterprise software solution development effort where we do not use a Requirements Management tool like Caliber or Visual Studio TFS. Our requirements are created in Word using standardized templates and distributed to Development and Test teams for consumption. Test cases are written in Excel an...

Posted by: Seilevel

» BA Careers - Is industry experience more important than Analytical skill?

(2164 Views) (5 Comments)

Business Analysts often delve into business requirements, gathering, understanding and documenting business processes and functions. An analytical mind and detailed information gathering are considered to be essential; one wonders though, if industry experience is a must for good business analysis skills. After all, if you knew well the ins...

Posted by: HSantanam

» Capacity review - assets planning

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Capacity review Why should Business Analysts be concerned about IT Asset Capacity planning / review - because business analysts, in my opinion, are all about optimizing business processes - in many cases, closely linked to IT. With that said, here is some food for thought: IT Asset management - One of the core principles for Infor...

Posted by: HSantanam

» Project Risk Management: Estimating Techniques

(1673 Views) (3 Comments)

EMV process is used in the Decision Tree analysis, which visually maps out activity decision paths. As an example, if a deliverable for a project has two suppliers, and it is known that any delay in the crucial deliverable will result in additional resource idling/alternative costs of $1,000 per day, and that supplier "A" price is $20,000 and suppl...

Posted by: HSantanam

» Career Possibilities for Business Analysts-expanding your horizons

(1494 Views) (2 Comments)

You have achieved your short term BA goals. You want to expand your horizons and see what else is out there and how you can progress in your career and gain knowledge and keep your career up-to-date as well. What are some of the possibilities out there that won't force you to re-learn something new from scratch? Some possibilities for career and kn...

Posted by: HSantanam

» Moving to Agile Documentation – why ‘Pair Inspections’ make sense

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One of the more controversial techniques fostered by some in the agile community is ‘Pair Programming’. It is a practice that originates from Extreme Programming, a specific Agile process pioneered by Kent Beck. It is controversial, particularly for larger corporates because it seeks to adjust human behaviour patterns. In Pair Programming, develop...

Posted by: FergalMcGovern

» IT Black Ops

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I’ve worked on at least one project now and heard of several others where a super-secret development team works in parallel to solve the same business problem as the “official” IT project team. A coworker of mine coined the term “IT Black Ops” to refer to these sorts of projects where the business, either out of frustration, arrogance, or ignorance...

Posted by: Seilevel

» What do you do when the client isn’t focused on the business outcome?

(1169 Views) (1 Comments)

One of the values that we bring is that we can help our clients to decide what scope to cut by providing them with a framework that links quantifiable business objectives to specific features. We create an objective chain to do this and it helps to spotlight features that don’t feed into the core business purpose. Typically our stakeholders are abl...

Posted by: Seilevel

» It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye: Tips for Getting Closure on Your Project

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Sometimes projects are like villains in horror movies: they just won’t die. Even when you’ve doused them in gasoline, set them on fire, then dumped them in a river, they just keep coming back. A project’s extension beyond its natural or expected life is not good for the project as a whole (even though it might help keep you busy). Projects are expe...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Top 10 User Acceptance Testing Preparation Tips

(4142 Views) (1 Comments)

If you are a Product Manager or Business Analyst in charge of managing users through User Acceptance Testing (UAT), here are the top 10 things to do to prepare: Formal scripts – prepare formal scripts for the business users to run. If you can re-use any of QA’s scripts, all the better. At a minimum, use your use cases to build test scripts. ...

Posted by: Seilevel

» How many Business Analysts do I need on my project?

(1461 Views) (0 Comments)

At the beginning of almost every project (and even sometimes midway through them) we are asked to create a requirements plan and estimate the time required on tasks and the number of BAs necessary to execute it. In a later post I’ll talk about the actual plan items, but we do have a rule of thumb for how many BAs you need on a project. We have a s...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Is Your Product Knowldege an Asset or Liability?

(1581 Views) (0 Comments)

There was recently an interesting post by John Mansour on the Austin PMM Forum (registration required) discussing whether Product Knowledge was an Asset or Liability to product managers. The author makes several claims about how product knowledge is a liability: “In a nutshell, the more product knowledge you have, the less product management yo...

Posted by: Seilevel

» Planning for Uncertainty

(1124 Views) (0 Comments)

The probability that a project will succeed is different for different cost and time targets. There isn't a single right answer to "How long will it take?" or "How much will it cost?" There are a whole bunch of answers, each with its own probability of being right. The conventional techniques for planning projects only give us one answer—and it's ...

Posted by: Marc Thibault

» Humor: Project Management Speak vs. Business Analysis Wisdom

(4508 Views) (3 Comments)

It is common for project managers to question the number of BAs they need on a project or how much time needs to be spent on analysis. The underlying concern seems to be a fear of “analysis paralysis”. Whilst not overtly stated, for many project managers, analysis is a necessary evil that if not carefully controlled, will delay the “real” work of w...

Posted by: Martin

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Entries for the 'Project Management' Category

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Entries for the 'Project Management' Category

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Business Analysts, Business Process Professionals,
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