Welcome to our Seilevel Photo Op.
Five years ago, nobody really remembered Alexander Hamilton, but with the helping hand of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical he has burst back into the spotlight over two hundred years later. While I will agree that Miranda’s songs are incredible, there is not enough focus on Hamilton’s greatest achievement: he got the US …
I am a firm believer that any situation in life or in business can be traced to an episode of either The Simpsons or Seinfeld. In The Simpsons season 2 episode “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou,” the patriarch of the Simpson family designs a car, which provides a surprisingly sophisticated …
Email is a significant part of my business life, and probably yours as well. I really appreciate a well-written email. And, I’m frequently frustrated by a poorly written one. Janelle Estes’ recent post, Email Subject Lines: 5 Tips to Attract Readers is written with newsletters in mind, but I think …
When facilitating elicitation sessions with stakeholders, the business analyst really must play the role of detective to extract their underlying problems, objectives, and needs. Rust Cohle, one of two protagonists in HBO’s critically-acclaimed series True Detectives, exhibits some of the qualities that business analysts should seek when attempting to elicit …
On a recent project, I was sitting in a room full of subject matter experts (SMEs), trying to document a business process using the trusty Process Flow model, when trouble struck. Before the meeting, the team was “lucky” enough to discover process flows for the very process we were focusing …
One of the challenges of gathering requirements in a world of packed schedules and remote stakeholders is the ubiquitous conference call. What I find most challenging is the inability to read facial cues or body language. When discussing stakeholder needs over the phone, what they say may not be entirely …
This is the second part of a two-part video, describing how to use and create the Decision Table model. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Yx1wO07XQ&feature=c4-overview&list=UUkQ_qa34JnQPDjwIPx0HxxA
As a BA, I’m always looking for tools that can help me with my job…anything to make my life just a bit easier! I’m always curious about the latest requirement management tools that come out, and I love to play with new diagraming tools! But sometimes, it’s the low tech …
Poor requirements too often result in delay and expensive rework, but in the case of a Miami prison that repeatedly released all of its maximum security inmates from their cells, missed requirements caused serious injury. As reported by Wired Magazine, on two separate occasions the doors of Turner Guilford Knight …
If you’ve read any posts in this blog, you’ve probably already picked up that visual models provide many benefits to any requirements elicitation and documentation project. I want to mention one you may have not thought about: visual models make delegation much easier. Delegation of work to junior business analysts …
