The Community Blog for Business Analysts

Requirements I have been working with requirements for more than 20 years. To be honest, it was several years before I understood the true purpose of requirements. The enlightenment came about when I was tasked with documenting a presentation to my colleagues that described the characteristics of a ‘good’ requirement. The characteristics that the ...

A “What If” question for business analysts and IT professionals… What if it suddenly became very easy for someone to do both your job and their own, at the same time? If history provides any forecast for the future of IT, we are likely to see some interesting changes in the way human capital is managed – especially for those of us involved in the...

I am in charge of a relatively big training effort for a project (approximately 45 live training sessions in 10 weeks, as well as online training opportunities) to assist with the deployment of a new piece of software.  The live training alone will involve over 450 people and will be quite in depth and hands on.  Training often plays a cr...

I seem to find quite a few job postings for Business Analysts that have a couple of lines in the ‘tasks to perform’ description that scare me like: Define test strategy and test plan Develop and execute test cases Perform stress and load test scenarios It’s not that I don’t believe I am capable of these tasks at some l...

Hello Everyone! I am new to this community blog, and I am interested in learning more about CBAP certification as it relates to my job search. In brief, I was employed with a company for 14 years before being downsized in a mass complany layoff last year.  Before the layoff, my title over my last 5 years was a Business Systems Analyst.&...

 In my time at programming I created or used any number of routines over and over again that did a specific job, from just a small function like adding a number of days to a date to writing out an error report or selecting data from an SQL database. Now I'm a business analyst and there are many process modelling applications out there that f...

The tips below are things I've learned the hard way and I think they're going to help you, especially if you're new in the BA field. You don't have to take things too seriously, don't be too harsh on yourself and others. There will always be people who criticize you but also those who understand you. Learning how to talk to users, how to manage ...

  This model is provided by Don Firesmith of SEI.  Note the lack of an NFR category. More

Hello BA's I´m a recent CBAP and first's in Portugal. I think the market of business don't know importance of the certification and i'm waiting to see the development of the CBAP here.

We have been struggling with what to include in a Business Requirements Document concerning reports. Because our BRD is more or less a contract between the client and our IT department, the greater the detail in this document the longer the time to obtain signoff. There are always modifications that are deemed necessary before signoff can happen. O...