Conflicting Incentives and other Economic Principles
March 17, 2010
One of my all time favorite books is by William Easterly and is entitled The Elusive Quest For Growth: Economists’ Misadventures in the Tropics. I read this book as part of a class in grad school and whenever I'm in a BA role, the book is never... Read more...
Requirements Documents in an iPad World
March 16, 2010
One of the items which I have intermittently struggled with as a BA is how to properly format requirements documents. It has always frustrated me that requirements documents created in a word processor are tied to the default paper size for... Read more...
Mindmapping PM
March 16, 2010
I was thinking about ways to introduce the ideas in PM to someone totally new to the ideas - like a new project sponsor or executive put in charge of a project unit. This is my first pass at layering the ideas. What do you think?(Click on... Read more...
Defending your position
March 15, 2010
Today I had a meeting where a project stakeholder kept on highlighting additional things for us to do. My instinct is to justify that our existing plan is fine and that his concerns are not a priority.Of course that instinct is wrong, and I know... Read more...
Read BABOK on Google books (for free)
March 14, 2010
Google books has the BABOK available for free online reading.I think this is a great idea from the guys at the IIBA. Congratulations IIBA on sharing knowledge rather than restricting it to those that can afford to join the club. It highlights the... Read more...
How much do your project stakeholders appreciate your work?
March 12, 2010
Listen to this story and think about how and why project stakeholders react to your project outcomes.Experience is only part of the story. Memory, and it's related but different perceptions of what really happened is another - even more important... Read more...
PM students
March 12, 2010
On Tuesday I start another semester of teaching PM to a bunch of students enrolled in a Masters of IT. I've been doing it for two years so far. This is my third.Teaching is an interesting job. It's tiring lecturing and delivering all... Read more...
Kano analysis and Bernoulli’s error
March 11, 2010
By now we should all have an idea what Kano analysis looks like. There are basic, performance and excitement classes of requirements. You generally have to work your way through the basic ones before you can start to address the other categories.I have... Read more...
What tools do you use?
March 10, 2010
In Jan and Derek's article I linked to yesterday there is a set of statistics from the IIBA 'Practices survey" from 2008."Whilst the most regularly used diagramming technique was flowcharting (63%), when it came to formal diagramming notations, use case... Read more...
What is a Business Analyst, by Jan and Derek
March 9, 2010
Everyone that writes on the role of the business analyst eventually has to cover their take on what the role actually is about.One of the best articles I read when doing research for my own position was by Jan Kusiak and Derek Brown. Last year I met... Read more...