Twas the night of Thanksgiving, And all through the house All the dishes were ready The food was set out And while we were eating, Just out of the blue, It hit: the newsletter!! Oh, what do we do?! Our oldest child does a lot of the artwork and graphics for B2T4U, our monthly newsletter. While cleaning up after Thanksgiving dinner, they asked me about the theme for the December newsletter so they could get a head start on the banner design. Pretty sure I looked like this: I think we’ve all had that moment. The one where we realize, “this is due right now, and I’ve got nothin’.” So how di ..read more

I like to focus on the positive. I’m the person who skips right over the headlines about attacks and shootings to get to the stories that make me feel good. I figured out a few years ago that if something was really important and world altering, somebody in my family would tell me about it at the dinner table. So, articles about death and destruction? Nope. Stories highlighting reunited families and local heroes? Count me in. If you search online, you’ll see lots of negative statistics about project success.  Numerous sites claim that 70% of change initiatives fail. That’s pretty scary ..read more

I recently had a thought process that I wanted to share… I promise it ends with something useful! I was initially reflecting on Earth Day, which is coming up soon, and thought about how the motto of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” can be applied to our work – our processes, tasks, and even people. My mind then wandered to the recent pandemic and how organizations will need to be better optimized in the future if they want to be able to overcome another dynamic shift like that one. From there, my mind immediately went to large-scale optimization, and I wanted to share a technique that anyone can us ..read more

Here’s a question related to requirements validation that pops up regularly in the classes we teach: How do I know I’m not missing any requirements?  My first response is: “You don’t!” I know that’s not what you want to hear, but you have to remember that nothing is perfect. Unfortunately, as business analysts we typically have at least a little bit of perfectionist in us by nature so it is no wonder that validating requirements work is important to us. But, since we can’t always be perfect, we should strive for the best we can do given the resources that we have. How do we do that? Le ..read more

Have you ever been a part of the “meeting after the meeting?” You know, the one where colleagues get together to debrief a meeting that’s recently taken place? The “meeting after the meeting” (MATM) typically includes two main agenda items: the debrief and the re-plan. First, attendees debrief to try to identify what actually took place or got achieved in the first meeting. Then they re-plan and schedule a new meeting, the purpose of which is to accomplish the progress or goals that should have been achieved in the first. Such a colossal waste of time, having multiple me ..read more

When you ask an analytical person a question, you will rarely get an answer. Instead, their response will likely be in the form of another question. Why is this? Answers depend on context. Context refers to the framework of a situation or event. Even a simple conversation requires context to be understood. Consider this dialogue: Friend: “Would you like to go see a movie?” Me: “When are you going?” Friend: “Friday” Me: “What movie?” Friend: “The new Marvel movie.” Me: “That sounds great, I want to see that! What time?” Friend: “Late. Pick you up at 8?” Me: “Perfect.” All o ..read more

Maybe it’s just me, but I frequently find that the most challenging aspect of a project is the people. We refer to the people involved in a project as “stakeholders”. Just knowing who your stakeholders are isn’t enough. We need to analyze stakeholders and develop a thorough understanding of them in order to work effectively with them. The BABOK® Guide says that stakeholder analysis involves not just identifying stakeholders, but also identifying their “characteristics”. Hmm. That’s…helpful. What exactly are stakeholder “characteristics”? I think stakeholder characteristics can be gro ..read more

Metrics of the Past Have Taught Us A Lesson Many traditional KPIs can instigate and proliferate bad behaviors in software development. In the past, programmers have measured their progress by how many lines of code they’ve written, quality was measured by the number of bugs fixed, and user needs were considered met by checking off a list of requirements. Traditional software development approaches, which are infamously known as Waterfall methods, included several common KPI ingredients: performance, process, and delivery. Performance goals → fast delivery Process goals → lean and at the l ..read more

What should your metrics tell you about your organization? They should tell you: Did we succeed with what we did in the recent past? Are we succeeding now? Will we succeed in the future? Traditional metrics often measure outputs, not outcomes. In an ‘agile world’, we need to understand if what we are doing is producing results and delivering value. If we don’t, we might not be able to keep up with the competition and may not survive. We need to focus on measurements that tell us the story of how we are doing now and in what direction we need to head. Let’s look at some metrics, and better ..read more

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there were two Business Analysts that wondered how they could be more than average. They wondered what habits they needed to become highly effective and how they could help others become highly effective. They thought and they planned. They collaborated and communicated across their time zones, cultures and countries. They identified the real problems dividing the highly effective BAs from the others. They identified those most important habits to include and prioritized which would be shared. They created GAFFs to describe not-SMART requirements. Th ..read more