The Community Blog for Business Analysts

I recently had the chance to spend half a day with some customer service representatives (CSR) in one of my organization's call centers, in order to get a better grip on their work and to see how they interact with the multiple systems available to them to better serve our customers. I didn't answer any customer call (God bless them!), but I sat n...

If you are managing a team of business analysts or systems analyst you probably have two main goals in mind:  - to make sure your team understand the requirements (the real ones)  - to make sure that you develop a solution which makes sense in the context of your constraints.  The chances are that one of your biggest constraints...

A while back, I was reading a Computerworld - Singapore article on Business Intelligence and embedded in it was a small, but significant, truth about the business analyst role.  The article points out that a common mistake made by many organizations is to treat the business analyst as a request taker. That is - if the bu...

I was lucky enough for awhile to do very technical systems analyst work.  Now I am only given what I suppose are traditional BA assignments.  I find the work boring, tedious, uninspiring, and most of all I feel unappreciated and undervalued.  I feel like a glorified secretary - I take notes and write up requirements or meeting minute...

While the Business Systems Analysis line of work is just beginning to be recognized as a profession of its own, the shortage of business analysts and systems analysts continues to get worse.  And the shortage is global!  Would you believe that India is having a shortage of qualified IT professionals? Well, you better believe it!&nbs...

The problem: Do you know when you’re done? Given a specific project with a reasonably defined charter and clear business goals you, the business analyst, set out to elicit and document the detailed business requirements. So when do you stop? Whether you lead a team of business analysts or you do the work yourself, you probably struggled tr...

To be an average analyst is fairly simple... ....  all you have to do is go to all the meetings, complete all the mandatory training courses, and listen to feedback from your manager. But... IF you want to be a GREAT analyst - if you want to truly be successful  THEN that's not enough.  To truly succ...

This post describes three great tools for managing bulleted lists in Microsoft Word. They allow you to automatically punctuate them , reorder them , and select them for further processing. This post complements my earlier article Three Great Tools for Editing Tables that described tools for efficiently entering and numbering the content in Micr...

I use Microsoft Word a great deal in my work as a BA, it is my primary tool for formally communicating text based project deliverables.  Where I can, I like to use tables, so that I can quickly capture information and present it without having to write full, grammatically correct paragraphs. Over the last few years, I have prepared a numbe...

ABSTRACT Software development is burdened with high levels of complexity (and many unknowns), yet it requires perfection for the software to compile and work. Because of these factors, no estimation approach is going to be foolproof. It is believed that relative item point estimation is just as accurate as any alternative (WBS, UCP) while offering...