Welcome to our Seilevel Photo Op.
What? In 1999, Buckingham and Coffman authored First, Break All the Rules. They used Gallop data from manager interviews to identify how good managers drive employee satisfaction. Internally at Seilevel, we use the methodology described in the book for gauging employee satisfaction. People who join us are sometimes surprised by our …
If you spend any time in software development, inevitably there will be some tight deadlines and death marches, leading to stressful weeks or months for all team members—developers, testers, analysts, and managers. Having found myself in just such a situation lately, I began internalizing the project stress, compounded by some …
In my previous post, I talked about how business analysts and product managers who are putting together requirements documentation can and should think of themselves as storytellers. By thinking of a Business Requirements Document (BRD) or a System Requirements Specification (SRS) as a narrative, with a beginning, middle and end, …
I provided some business analysis training a while ago, and recently caught up with one of the attendees of the training; a lovely lady whom, for the purposes of this post, we’ll call Pat. I was inquiring how things were going and whether or not she was able to incorporate …
All too often, business analysts and product managers find themselves in the roll of glorified scribe. We use elicitation techniques to get our business partners and customers tell us what they think the system needs to do and then we diligently write high quality requirements to describe that for development …
Client confidence is of paramount importance to the success of a business analysis consultant. If a client believes in you, he or she will be much more likely to make time for your questions and needs, believe in your ideas and solutions, and be more forgiving of your mistakes. A …
During the past few RA trainings at Seilevel, the requirements analysts (or “the newbies” of the company) have been giving mock presentations and receiving direct criticism. As we are all fairly new to our positions and still learning the space, most of us get nervous when we speak. Probably less …
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but I learned to type on a typewriter. One of the rules I learned in typing class was to put two spaces after the period ending each sentence. I still do it by habit, even though the standard seems to have changed to one space. …
Many benefits of using a requirements management tool don’t become obvious until you actually use one. On a recent project, we used Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) to organize all our project information, and it was amazing how it simplified everything. It was such a relief to have everything in …
