Business Analyst

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Business Analysts are asked to do many things: elicit, document, and manage requirements; facilitate meetings; fit/gap and feasibility studies, and act as a bridge or liaison between functional and technical groups. We often look at this mix of activities and think “This is my job”. However, I’m going to talk about the things that a [...]

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Business email requires a different approach to personal email.  How should you write a business email?  What are the common mistakes to avoid? Email revolutionized the world of business communications, giving you the ability to send messages and documents instantly to different people all over the world. This way of communicating, however, has also become [...]

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Something that I’ve actually been asked while pitching for work is “What does a Business Analyst actually do?”. While I won the work in that instance, I was never happy with the answer that I gave at the time. I managed to babble something out about how a BA was the bridge between IT and [...]

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A Business Analyst acts as a face of Customer to the Development team, most of the time. A Business Analyst should be credible enough and the team should have absolute faith in him. Development team should be able to ask any question regarding the system and they should believe in the answers that BAs provide. [...]

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The wilderness between IT and business is our realm. We wrestle semantics and drive out definitions. We begin as Analysts and advance to Architects. We’re not strictly tech and we’re not strictly business. The definition of what we do is usually written in semi-tech language (we write requirements). But how do we write those requirements, [...]

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Software success depends on developing a collaborative partnership between software developers and their customers. Too often, though, the customer-developer relationship becomes strained or even adversarial. Problems arise partly because people don’t share a clear understanding of what requirements are and who the customers are. To clarify key aspects of the customer-developer partnership, I propose a [...]

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“Our customer doesn’t know what he wants,” complained Sandy. “I try to get him to talk about the product and tell me what he wants, but it’s like pulling teeth.” Whether you are building a brand new product or working on evolving an existing product, understanding customer business needs is the foundation of a marketable [...]