The Community Blog for Business Analysts

Decision Model and Notation in short DMN is a novel way to model business decisions. DMN allows capturing and modeling business decisions in a way that is easy to understand with business people and subject matter experts. It is a combination of: Decision requirement diagram – DRD Decision table Boxed expressions Fr...

Background Like most Scrum teams, we held “Sprint Review Meeting” every two weeks. We would gather as a team to demo what was recently built & receive feedback. Although it was a great opportunity to showcase recent work, we identified a number of problems with “Sprint Review Meetings” for our mature product:  1.&...

At Seilevel, we updated and re-published our Requirements Management (RM) Tool Study this past year, looking at over 150 tools and over 200 criteria. We did this in phases with the subset of tools making it though each phase getting smaller and smaller until we ran 21 tools through the full evaluation criteria to rank them. This tool study is a gre...

The previous two posts in the Requirements Prioritization series, we discussed the honest difficulty that stakeholders face when asked to simply prioritize requirements, and how to overcome this obstacle by using prioritization parameters. If you have not read these posts, I recommend you read them first here and here....

If you’re a business analyst whose company recently made the move to agile, you may be wondering where you fit in when there is no business analyst role. Or maybe you made the move to be an agile business analyst or product owner but don’t know how your traditional business analyst skills figure into this new agile world. Well the good ...

In my previous blog post titled "All requirements are important!", I reasoned that stakeholders only appear to be uncooperative in the prioritization process. In reality, they are unable to prioritize requirements because they cannot see one requirement more or less important than the other. I urged you to ponder whether ...

I was running a meeting with a few stakeholders. I was imploring them to indicate the relative importance of requirements, but was hitting a brick wall; they kept insisting, "They all look the same to me. All requirements are important. They all are must-haves." I tried to reason with them multiple times over. There are just too many requirements...

My youngest daughter was scheduled for her first dentist appointment.  She couldn’t contain her excitement.  She had her stuffed dog, dentist-visiting attire and bright, sparkling smile ready for the event.  She was ready to go.  Little did I realize that not only would my daughter come away with a clean-bill of dental hea...

This is in continuation of my earlier post on Business Requirement. If you have not read that post, I recommend you take a few minutes to study that first before continuing with this post. In this post, let's discuss Stakeholder Requirement. Some people refer to this as User Requirement, but BABOK's nomenclature is Stakeholder Requi...

Yes, yes...you are right. This is an elephant.  Well, no. This post is not about the elephant. The elephant is used only for symbolism.  And you are right...there are a lot of other similar posts out there. This is my take on this topic. It is different from others. So, what does the elephant stand for? T...