One question we often hear is, what are some good business analyst interview questions? Another is, how do you tell whether you are asking good business analysis questions? As a company focused on training our attendees to think for themselves, we normally say to start by first identifying how someone looks when you’re asking the wrong questions. For example, you know it’s a bad question when the person you are interviewing is either: Totally baffled (doesn’t understand what you mean) or…
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Modelling and Your Next Interview
02/02/2015 |
By IRM Training
Have you ever had a business analyst job interview and had this said to you? “Your skills and experience are great but unfortunately you’ve never worked in this industry before”. And it’s not just business analyst job interviews. On many projects you’ll come across a user who’ll say “I haven’t got the time to explain to you how my business works”. Nobody can be an expert at everything but as a business analyst you’ve actually got some real advantages -…
Continue ReadingUse Case Fragments
30/09/2014 |
By IRM Training
A previous IRM article Event Based Analysis and Modelling described how business functionality in a requirements package can be broken down into a table with column headings – Event, Trigger, Initiator, Use Case name, etc. Each business function is a separate event and has a unique number. A typical business function might contain several unique events each of which we want to end up as a component of a larger software application. So how do we go from a table containing…
Continue ReadingFacilitated Workshops – When and Why
18/08/2014 |
By IRM Training
Overview The “good old workshop”. As a business analyst practitioner and trainer I often get asked the question “Should we use a workshop?” quickly followed by “How do we run it?” This article addresses the first question regarding facilitated workshops – subsequent articles will look at the second. When to Use Facilitated Workshops? The first job in deciding whether to run a facilitated workshop (as opposed to more traditional approaches such as interviewing) is in understanding our objectives for the workshop…
Continue ReadingHow to Manage Client Expectations
29/07/2014 |
By IRM Training
It’s funny how often things we say can come back and bite us. Has this ever happened to you? We’re all guilty of sometimes hearing what we want to hear – but when it’s a client, is it their fault or ours? Now there’s not a lot you can do to change how other people interpret information, so let’s assume the onus is on us to make sure this doesn’t occur. We need to be crystal clear in our communications…
Continue ReadingThere’s More to Modelling than Runways and Catwalks
02/06/2014 |
By IRM Training
How often have you seen a TV clip from a fashion show – Milan, London, New York – and thought to yourself “What on earth are the models wearing?!”. Business analysts can be guilty of something similar. Sure it’s a model, but what does it mean, what’s it trying to say? In the fashion industry, models are used to communicate (to bring to life) a designer’s ideas and creations. But they also go one step further – helping us the…
Continue ReadingRequirements & Big Data Projects
31/01/2014 |
By IRM Training
With big data projects rapidly becoming mainstream for even medium-sized organisations, more and more business analysts need to understand the business drivers that underpin business analytics projects. This recent paper, Forward Thinking for Tomorrow’s Projects – Requirements for Business Analytics, by Joy Beatty and Karl Wiegers of Seilevel Inc. avoids most of the technology jargon and instead focuses on what’s important for the business analyst. It’s an excellent paper resource, which we recommend you read in order to keep up…
Continue ReadingWriting Better Requirements
07/11/2013 |
By IRM Training
There’s little argument that investigating and identifying business needs (i.e. requirements) is a critical task of business analysis. However it’s of little use correctly identifying business needs if we can’t then effectively document them – to the clients who will be paying for the solution and to the developers who will be building it. In today’s time poor world we need to address both audiences in a single document. This paper – based on IRM’s Writing Better Requirements workshop –…
Continue ReadingIs Business Analysis Low Tech?
13/07/2013 |
By IRM Training
Many course attendees ask us – what are the best business analysis tools, what software should I use, can we have computers in the training room? The reality is, the more sophisticated the software you’re using, the greater the chance it will hinder, rather than help, the business analysis process. Almost 10 years ago, an article by Scott Ambler, Software Modeling on Whiteboards, argued that the modelling tool with the greatest installed base in the world was the whiteboard. Scott…
Continue ReadingThe BA’s Journey – From a Current to a Future State
01/12/2012 |
By IRM Training
Many words have been written about the process of business analysis and how it can be performed on different types of projects. There are a multitude of tools and techniques which can be used plus methodologies and frameworks to suit a wide variety of circumstances. This makes it all too easy to get absorbed in the day-to-day detail and forget about the real purpose of business analysis – to fix a problem or provide the organisation with a new capability….
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