Stories from the Business Analysts

nvisia is an award-winning software development partner driving competitive edge for clients.

 

Following up from the great feedback on the BA tips and tricks– we wanted to go more in depth in areas that are interesting to us and to you.

I would like to share with you, some common challenges, that we have had experience with and can recommend a solution for, so that you can be successful on your projects.   We’ve managed Waterfall projects, Iterative/RUP project, and Agile projects. It’s interesting to note what’s the same, what’s different, and how to be successful, no matter the project stlye.

In the stories below, we’ll use a fictitious company that we’ll call FauxCo.  Chances are, if the situation we describe feels ‘just like my company’ – don’t be surprised! These are common challenges we’ve seen across multiple organizations, both in both our consulting and pre-consulting roles.

FauxCo is growing!  They are a mid to large sized company with project and software development processes, an infrastructure for testing and promoting releases into production.  They have a commitment to their customers, have business drivers that dictate what features should be released, and every project is behind.  Sound familiar?  They also have separated IT and Business organizations, but they both need to depend on each other to be successful.  The friction between the organizations is ‘expected’ and doesn’t go away.

An underlying theme of these posts are to share thoughts and ideas for you to use, for your project to be successful, and how to provide the best value for your business or IT sponsor.

I’m the BA! Why should I care about Data? From the BA perspective, data can no longer be an afterthought!  Successful projects think about the data during the business requirements process, in both iterative and agile projects.

The Value of BA and Data Architecture Collaboration -  When writing requirements (either system or business requirements), it is important to be clear about the data to be displayed or utilized. If FauxCo specifies that an address is to be displayed to the sales team, the next question should be “Which Address?”

 

Stay tuned for future blogs: 

Adding Agile Best Practices into your non-Agile processes
Agile, Iterative, Waterfall – picking and choosing the best practices that work for your organization
The Value of BA and System Architecture collaboration
Writing Service Requirements
Business Process Definition – the Unheralded Skillset
Secret Asset!  The BA role and Testing
Data Quality and the NVISIA BA
The NVISIA BA – Extra Skillsets in the BA role
 

 

For Additional Related Blog Post please check out NVISIA's Agile Software Analysis Page

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