"The 2009 Benchmark of Salaries and Employment Trends in IT survey from the National Computing Centre says one-third of respondents have experienced a shortage of candidates with certain key skills. According to the survey, 33.7 percent of organisations highlight problems recruiting or retaining people with Oracle, SAP, .NET, web developmen...

I’ve had the chance to interview numerous candidates for business analyst positions and there is one question I like to ask every one of them: “What do you do to increase your skills and value as a Business Analyst?” Obviously, I’m not looking to get a specific answer as each business analyst has different backgrou...

Recently, the media was buzzing with news that president-elect Obama named Nancy Killefer, a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, as the nation's CPO.  That is Chief Performance Officer. According to the media "the newly created position aims to make government more efficient, effective and transparent". I...

If you are managing business or systems analysts, trying to identify the skills and competencies required of your analysts is not an easy task. The expectations placed upon the analyst vary widely from organization to organization. The variations are so drastic that the actual title doesn’t not say much about the type of work your analysts do. ...

In most of the projects and organizations I have worked for I have seen a very interesting pattern: - Developers get developer specific tools such as MS Visual Studio. - Testers get testing specific tools such as Mercury TestDirector. - Analysts get MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The more "progressive" organizations might provide their busin...

After posting my last entry on questioning suspect requirements, I've read a great piece on the SlickEdit blog titled "How to Design Software With Bad Requirements." Scott offers some practical tips to help developers deal with bad requirements. These also apply very well to business analysts and systems analysts: come up with good us...

The Systems Analyst role is and will continue to be one of the best careers for a long time. In their “Best Careers 2007” report, US News and World Report lists 25 professions that will continue to grow in demand. With the advent of outsourcing, it is not surprising that the software engineer or web developer professions are NOT on the list....

Michael Vinje, an I.T. and software engineering specialist with more than two decades experience, has written an article on 5 Traits of a Successful project. Anyone in charge of business analysts or systems analysts can benefit from understanding and analyzing these traits.  Here is a rather quick summary: 1. Balance demand with cap...