A little talk about my passion

Have you taken a results-oriented approach to identifying business requirements?

Apr30
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Paola

Starting with the desired business results ensures that we drive to only those requirements that directly support true business value.

First, it is an exercise that really puts into perspective the purpose of a business model (results).  This exercise is not only useful to the project team but also the business stakeholders.

Second, it is an approach that can help you justify why certain existing business activities are not being carried forward in the new business solution.

Third, taking a business results oriented approach enables your project team to be more successful at focusing on the right business requirements and not wasting time on capturing requirements for non-value-add activities.

Posted in Business Analysis, Functional Analysis

Things I love about Axure…

Mar15
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Paola

It’s a fantastic tool for quickly mocking up screens and working out the basic layout and functionality of a web site or application. It’s a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows you to drag widgets onto the screen and define some simple interactions–and it even gives you some simple tools for mocking up web 2.0 interactive functionality.

The great thing about it is it’s quick. You can show your customer (and the software engineers) an interface they can relate to, get feedback from your customer, make changes, and turn it all around in a matter of minutes or hours (instead of days or weeks). What a fantastic way to communicate and work!

It allows for dynamic interaction in an AJAX world. You’re no longer stuck with static screenshots for wireframes. You can actually interact with a page, have panels show and hide based on some actual conditions (like “if this box is checked, show this panel”).

You can make notes about how a page should work as you design it. Sometimes you don’t have time to sit down and put in all the interactions. Axure handles that situation beautifully: with page notes.

Posted in Functional Analysis

How can you make yourself more valuable to your agile team and organization using your business analysis skills and abilities?

Mar04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Paola

As a business analyst, are you ready to make the transition to this value-centered development approach? How will your role change? What will you do differently? What will you actually do as part of an agile team? What agile analysis practices might you adapt if you’re working on a traditional (waterfall-style) project?

With agile, value comes from the customer
On agile projects, the customer has the responsibility-and the burden-to decide which items the delivery team will build and when.

For the project to succeed, the customer must conduct a mix of strategic and tactical activities. Strategic activities include analyzing the market and business case, defining the product vision and roadmap, developing requirements, adjusting the product backlog, and determining delivery plans. The customer also conducts tactical activities such as specifying the items to be delivered in each iteration, determining when each item is complete, analyzing dependencies between items, and helping the team analyze requirements stories.

It’s about the work, not the role
Keep in mind: it’s not about the job role or title you have, it’s about the work. So when I use the term “agile business analyst,” I mean anyone who is doing the work of requirements (business) analysis on an agile team.

Some agile teams may not have a team member who is the designated business analyst, or they may have a business analyst whose only role is business analysis and requirements-related work. A variety of people who have the skills may do the work of analysis, and it may be shared among team members. That is common in small projects or when the team members have rich business domain expertise along with close, trusting relationships with their business customers.

Setting the stage: Requirements planning activities
Design, facilitate, or participate in product vision and roadmapping workshops. Help your customer understand which roles and themes to best deliver in each product release. Help your customer and team identify logical groupings of value-based requirements, and use these groupings to create a product roadmap showing incrementally delivered requirements over time.

Requirements analysis activities
Help your customer define the vision and the scope up front-at a high level only. Collaborate with architects and developers on design to ensure that requirements include the technical aspects of the product. Help your customer and team develop and extend analysis models that support understanding backlog items selected for delivery in an iteration-if and when needed.

Requirements specification activities
Help your customer and team write stories (or if you’re acting as proxy customer, you write them).  Create doneness criteria for stories so that each becomes a well-defined, small piece of valuable software for delivery in the next (or current) iteration. Create user acceptance tests or sample input and output data for each story.

Requirements validation activities
Meet with the customer and some team members to prune the backlog (once or twice each week). Participate in iteration demonstrations and listen to stakeholder feedback on the delivered requirements to learn the customer’s real needs and determine how to adapt the evolving product.Participate in daily stand-ups.Define input data and expected results or specific user acceptance tests as part of defining doneness for each user story, iteration by iteration.

Posted in Business Analysis, Functional Analysis

Social Media Impact the Business World

Feb26
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Paola

By creating a comprehensive social media strategy, you cannot only impact your company’s bottom line, but several aspects of your business including customer service, sales, and awareness of your brand.

Looking at 4 major different social media tools/social networking sites, you can impact many aspects of your business, here some information that can be usefull when creating a social media strategy:

Facebook: With 500+ million users and as the most popular social networking site to date, it is no surprise that Facebook is one of the most utilized tools when conducting a job search. For example, there are over 180 countries that use Facebook every day.  So, now, networking not only has expanded from state to state, but from country to country.  Looking for a job abroad? Facebook may be a great way to connect before traveling thousands of miles away for a job interview.

LinkedIN: Operating on a smaller scale, LinkedIN, has a just about 80 million users.  Spanning over 200 countries, business professionals are able to network form virtually anywhere at any time. Executives from all Fortune 500 Companies have a LinkedIN accounts that are actively utilized.  Being able to network globally (and on a completely professional platform) is a benefit when conducting a job search, especially when looking for opportunities outside of where you may live.

Twitter : Twitter operates daily with over 180 million visitors/users to the site a day.  Within those 180 million, about 90 million, or 49%, of them “follow” a specific company. Companies who utilize twitter can effectively market themselves and inform their followers of job opportunities or other information that may help them when looking for a job.

Skype: The video chat site which allows users to “call” one another globally via voice or video chat, is emerging as a quick, cheap and easy route for interviewing job candidates.  Over the course of one day, 84.4 billion minutes of “talk time” are utilized between Skype’s 124 million user base.  84.4 Billion minutes would accumulate to approximately 159,817 years of talking by one person!

Posted in Social Media

Why SEO?

Feb24
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Paola

The answer is simply: Search Engine Optimization is not as simple a procedure as installing a digital ad in someone else’s website. There is no ‘automated’ solution to search engine optimization that you can access through the click of a button. SEO is a process that spans weeks or months even to achieve the desired results.

The process always starts with ‘you’!!!

Posted in Search Engine Optimization

4 important considerations when gathering requirements from customers

Feb22
2011 1 Comment Written by Paola

In the traditional waterfall model of software development, the first phase of requirements analysis is also the most important one. This article discusses some of the more common problems that analyst experience during Lyfe Cycle of a project.

Problem 1: Customers don’t (really) know what they want:

Possibly the most common problem in the requirements analysis phase is that customers have only a vague idea of what they need.

To solve this problem, you should:

  • Ensure that you spend sufficient time at the start of the project on understanding the objectives, deliverables and scope of the project.
  • Make visible any assumptions that the customer is using, and critically evaluate both the likely end-user benefits and risks of the project.

Problem 2: Requirements change during the course of the project:

The second most common problem with software projects is that the requirements defined in the first phase change as the project progresses. This may occur because as development progresses and prototypes are developed, customers are able to more clearly see problems with the original plan and make necessary course corrections; it may also occur because changes in the external environment require reshaping of the original business problem and hence necessitates a different solution than the one originally proposed.

To solve this problem, you should:

  • Have a clearly defined process for receiving, analyzing and incorporating change requests, and make your customer aware of his/her entry point into this process.
  • Ensure that change requests (and approvals) are clearly communicated to all stakeholders, together with their rationale, and that the master project plan is updated accordingly.

Problem 3: Customers have unreasonable timelines:

It’s quite common to hear a customer say something like “it’s an emergency job and we need this project completed in X weeks”. A common mistake is to agree to such timelines before actually performing a detailed analysis and understanding both of the scope of the project and the resources necessary to execute it.

To solve this problem, you should:

  • Convert the software requirements specification into a project plan, detailing tasks and resources needed at each stage and modeling best-case, middle-case and worst-case scenarios.
  • Ensure that the project plan takes account of available resource constraints and keeps sufficient time for testing and quality inspection.

Problem 4: Communication gaps exist between customers, engineers and project managers

Often, customers and engineers fail to communicate clearly with each other because they come from different worlds and do not understand technical terms in the same way.

To solve this problem, you should:

  • Take notes at every meeting and disseminate these throughout the project team.
  • Be consistent in your use of words. Make yourself a glossary of the terms that you’re going to use right at the start, ensure all stakeholders have a copy, and stick to them consistently.
Posted in Business Analysis

Why are we so important?

Feb21
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Paola

Organizations have recognized that knowledge constitutes a valuable intangible asset for creating and sustaining competitive advantages in this technological world, we are the key!

Projects are typically started because a sponsor wants to change from the current state to a future state to help their organization meet the challenges of the marketplace. Our role as analyst is to help organizations understand the challenges before them to make this transition and to ensure that the needs and expectations of the client are represented correctly in the final solution.

Business analyst is a key person between business users  and software engineers . We are the bridge between business users and technical people who will typically understand the business terminology & business language of the client and as well as technical language at the development place.

Posted in Business Analysis, Functional Analysis