Entries for 'Transform VA'

Well-crafted strategic plans are mapped in detail from business design to agile solution delivery and execution to enable the necessary changes within an organization in response to customer needs, competition, and innovation. To achieve its strategies and goals, a firm needs to map and disseminate them cohesively throughout its organization using its entire planning ecosystems from executives, mid-level managers, strategists, business architects, enterprise architects, change managers, process experts, business analysts, and agile experts using the 7 levels of strategy mapping.

In the realm of software development, the clarity and accuracy of software requirements are pivotal for project success. Traditionally viewed as static documents to be archived post-project, this perspective neglects their ongoing potential.

Living software requirements is a paradigm where these documents evolve continually with the software, serving as an enduring source of truth. This approach not only maintains relevance but also actively shapes the software’s lifecycle, promoting adaptability and precision in development processes.

They ensure that as software grows and changes, the documentation is not left behind, thus avoiding the pitfalls of outdated or irrelevant information - because often zero documentation is worse than out of date documentation!

My boss is from the old school and he keeps talking about our ‘requirements repository’. We are trying to do agile, specifically Scrum. Are the user stories the requirements repository in Scrum? What should I tell him?

Although use cases are valuable for many projects, sometimes event analysis is a more effective requirements elicitation technique. Valuable as they are, use cases aren’t the ideal tool for every type of product. A complementary requirements elicitation strategy is to explore the various events that a system or product could experience and how it should respond to each of them. The response depends on what state the system is in when it detects the event. Event analysis is particularly well-suited for middleware products and real-time systems that include both software and hardware components.

In complex environments, cognitive load (relating to tax complexity and multiple inputs that affect decision-making) can significantly hamper the quality and efficiency of project choices. High-performance business analysts can play an integral and important role to avoid this issue by advocating for the adoption of a decision-making compass to deliver insight to stakeholders about how well their objectives may be satisfied by potential alternative courses of action. The next time you’re embarking on a high-stakes project, make sure you have a decision-making compass ready to use, even if only informally defined. While there is no guarantee that applying it to project choices will completely eliminate the risk of mistakes, it will no doubt help move things in the right direction and maximize performance.

So as a BA, you are important and beneficial to an organization. You are extremely critical to an organization. Now all you have to do is demonstrate how and here are some tips on how to demonstrate value.

Business Analysts elicit and document requirements in some way, shape, or form. By thoroughly understanding the needs and objectives of stakeholders, YOU ensure that projects and initiatives are aligned with the organization's strategic goals and objectives. Therefore, you are helping the organization to live up to the clear direction and purpose that was set, minimize conflict, promote teamwork, and ensure resources are utilized efficiently.

Companies that treat the documentation of customer stated needs, wants, demands, desires, ideas, specifications as the focal point of the BA work tend to pay a steep price by solving the wrong problem or addressing a problem manifestation rather than the underlying business issue. And now, with LLMs readily available to produce similar outputs at a much faster pace, there is reason to believe that these document-centric roles will soon join the statistics of LLMs replacing human jobs.

An adept BA, on the other hand, has no reason to fear an existential threat. It’s hard to predict exactly how generative AI will end up integrated into our work lives going forward. Still, LLMs are far from being able to send stakeholders in the desired direction, identify the initiatives that actually make sense and are likely to produce the desired result, and reliably answer the question, How does this project/feature/requirement we’re working on contribute to the organization’s strategy?

Much like a coach orchestrating a championship-winning sports team, the BA plays a multifaceted role in ensuring the effectiveness and efficiency of agile initiatives. They are tasked with guiding the team through the intricacies of information gathering, requirements elicitation, analysis, and prioritization, aligning disparate perspectives towards a common goal. Moreover, the BA acts as a catalyst for collaboration, fostering an environment where diverse skill sets converge to deliver tangible outcomes.

Manufacturing outburst in combination with automation makes us think sometimes that economy is changed too fast and we left behind. The recent COVID-19 pandemic crisis can be perceived as creative destruction emerged new models that can work. Cases of thriving during the time of chaos, where familiar ways of working stopped working, indicated that many regular people can thrive when a sense of purpose combined with financial perspective are present. Looking back into the experiences from lockdowns existential questions were risen and depicted through more quality measures than quantitative ones.

Requirement elicitation, a critical part of project development, is often perceived as a purely technical process. However, this is not always the case. Effective requirement elicitation relies not only on technical acumen but also on an understanding of how human cognition, biases, and behaviors shape the process and what we can do to mitigate the negative influence of these inherent human factors. In this article, we selected three critical human factors: confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, and groupthink. These factors are commonly experienced in requirement elicitation activities. The article delves into the intricacies of these human aspects of requirement gathering and illustrates their impact using examples. We dissect the impact of these biases on requirement gathering, shedding light on the potential consequences that can arise when they go unchecked. Furthermore, we discuss strategies and techniques for mitigating these biases, emphasizing the role of requirements analysts as impartial facilitators.

This simple activity was priceless in showing what you get when asking a group of BAs what may seem like a few simple, straight forward questions. And this all ties into the BA Mindset.

So what is the BA Mindset? It’s one thing to do business analysis activities, it’s another to THINK like a business analyst.

Let’s dive into what it is to be a business analyst and how the BA mindset fits into that.

As a business analyst, my journey unfolds with the same dynamic tension that propels the cat-and-mouse chase in this biographical film. Like Abagnale, I navigate through the intricate web of corporate challenges, constantly adapting and problem-solving in a landscape where the unexpected becomes the norm. The whispers of a business analyst form a subtle symphony, weaving through the complexities of uncharted territories, inviting stakeholders to join the pursuit of solutions, all while mastering the art of capturing elusive answers in the corporate labyrinth. So, in this enigmatic dance of analysis and innovation, the question remains — can you catch me if you can?

Achieving an equilibrium between the desire to produce more functionality and quality requirements is a challenge in most software development projects. Functional requirements are often in the spotlight because of their tangible impact on user experience and business value. But quality requirements silently underpin a system’s reliability, security, and robustness. In this article, we delve into the critical role played by quality requirements and the tension most software projects experience in managing these two types of requirements. Navigating the tension between functionality and quality is a challenge. The allure of visible functionality often overshadows quality attributes, leading to the unintentional neglect of quality requirements. This imbalance can result in costly consequences, including operational disruptions, post-release fixes, and damage to an organization’s reputation that may be caused by a security breach or a custom data privacy leak. To address this challenge, organizations must empower their technical teams to influence project priorities and actively participate in shaping product quality.

The objective of this article is to help business analysts deal with the task of eliciting and documenting non-functional requirements (NFRs) - also known as Quality Requirements. It describes NFR fundamentals in terms of who, what, when, where, and why. It’s considered one easy lesson because my series on functional requirements needed nine articles, and my series on data fundamentals needed 10.  This article assumes that the NFRs are wanted in relation to a software-based solution to a business problem or opportunity. Also assumed is that there are or will be functional requirements for the solution.

As a Business Analyst, there are so many directions or paths, you can take as BA and it's not because you have the title of BA, but it's because of the value you bring to any organization will all the skills and competencies you have. In this article, I will explore some common paths you can consider. For the context of this blog, we are going to consider rising from a Junior BA perspective.