Key success factors for Business Analysts, Product Owners, and Project Managers leading meetings. Facilitating meetings to successfully achieve their planned outcomes has always been a hot topic — and a challenge that hasn’t become any easier with remote participants, new technologies, and progressively more complicated projects and environments. Requirements Discovery Sessions (or similar meetings like User Story Workshops or Workflow Modeling Sessions) are special cases adding complexity and risks – requiring some additional considerations and thought. How do you set the best expectations an ..read more

Possibly the most effective method for eliciting requirements is the Discovery Session: a facilitated workshop with carefully selected stakeholders and subject matter experts held in order to collaboratively and collectively define the requirements for a product. Successful discovery sessions rely on a well-defined division of roles and responsibilities. Each participant brings unique expertise, contributing to a holistic understanding of the project’s goals, scope, and requirements. Most sessions require someone to play, and take the responsibility to represent, at least the first five roles ..read more

When Use Case Modeling is the Technique that can Break the Impasse in Your Project And How a Use Case Canvas Can Get You Going Here’s the situation: You need to understand a particular process so that the development or agile team can build the product to support it, or so you can write the RFI or RFP for a software solution. It may be that you have literally just started, have nothing, and you want to understand and model how the product will be used so that you can discover, document, and prioritize the capabilities and features (or high-level requirements, epics.) Or maybe the product owner ..read more

What are Discovery Canvases? Business Analysis Canvas Templates for Business Analysts, Project Managers, Enterprise Architects, Product Owners and Scrum Masters to facilitate visual collaboration of business analysis, business architecture, project management, and agile activities. Ross Little, IAG’s President and co-founder, when speaking to rooms of Business Analysts and Project Managers often talks about the BA’s version of the Blank Page Syndrome. Writers and designers are very familiar with the concept of being faced with a blank page and not knowing where to start and how to get that boo ..read more

What is a User Story Canvas and how a visual canvas template for having user story conversations can help improve your user stories and agile performance. One of the aspects of being a Business Analyst Consultant that I feel a keen responsibility for is asking good questions. By that, I mean asking questions that are both relevant and relatively easy to answer. When I started out my career as a BA I honesty did not think much about what questions to ask. If I were assigned the job to gather requirements for a project, I would just ask them what their requirements were. “What do you want?”, I’d ..read more

The influence of agile principles and practices on the business analysis and application development industry continues to become more and more significant and is impacting the way organizations are running projects, structuring their development operations, and conducting requirements definition and management activities. More and more organizations and BAs are embracing Agile frameworks and techniques as they adapt and improve in order to satisfy the demands of clients and goals of their organizations. The attractive benefits often attributed to Agile (speed to market, adaptiveness to change ..read more

As analysts, it is going to be natural that we are going to methodically analyze to make sure we select the best course that fits our requirements. Sometimes, however, the analysis can often get in the way of the decision rather than help it. So it is our hope that this post can help you – in your analysis and your decision – to choose the best Business Analysis class for you and your team. Choosing which course to take is actually not that difficult. Admittedly it is more challenging today with the options available from the plethora of 1-2 hour recorded video modules to live public courses a ..read more

Tip 1: Treat RDM software selection as any other project. Follow your project lifecycle and requirements definition and management (RDM) process—as you would for any other project. Apply sound project management and business analysis practices to assure that the solution you select best meets your need. Have your priority requirements drive the selection of the best software solution for your organization. There are dozens of viable solutions in this relatively niche market—covering a vast spectrum of capabilities. A Cadillac solution with features and integrations that are not needed may not ..read more

Introduction to the Agile Project Framework While relatively new to many, the Agile Business Consortium’s Agile Project Framework is actually the most established framework for agile project management in use today. For over 20 years, the framework has provided a practical and scalable Agile approach that balances the principles and benefits of agile development with structure and discipline of good project management.  One of the originators and key contributors of the framework, Arie Van Bennekum, was one of the founding members of the Agile Alliance and contributors to the Manifesto fo ..read more

Implementing new or refined processes, practices and rules for requirements and analysis in the project and development lifecycles can have significant organization benefits but can also be challenging and risks failure if not done effectively. The importance of effective change management cannot be overstated. IAG Consulting has learned a number of lessons from the hundreds of transformation programs we have implemented over the years. Here we share are few best practices to ensure the desired results are achieved as expected. 1. Define a Clear Vision, Strategy, and Goals Change initiatives t ..read more