Author Archives: R.P. Churchill

Item Tracking

Item tracking is how participants in an effort monitor what concerns, issues, and tasks are valid and need to be addressed, and who has responsibility. Items can arise in any phase of an engagement and be tracked through any other … Continue reading →

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Benchmarking and Market Analysis

Benchmarking involves learning about activities and characteristics across industries, organizations, products, methodologies, and technologies to identify best practices, product options, and competitive requirements. Benchmarking may be performed by comparing the presence or absence of features (which video editing programs can … Continue reading →

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The Requirements Life Cycle: Management and Reuse

Just as systems, products, and engagements have life cycles, requirements do as well. It’s easy to look at a requirements traceability matrix and imagine that all requirements spring magically anew from the ether during each engagement. Let’s look at some … Continue reading →

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Data Mining

Data mining is the processing of large quantities of data to glean useful insights and support decision-making. Descriptive techniques like generating graphical depictions or applying other methods allow users to identify patterns, trends, or clusters. Diagnostic techniques like decision trees … Continue reading →

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State Modeling

What do we mean by state? We commonly think of the states of matter as solid, liquid, and gaseous, and we know that these are dependent on temperature. For water at — atmospheric pressure — we refer to these states … Continue reading →

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Reviews

Reviews are about examining some output or artifact for quality and agreement. I primarily think of this process in terms of my framework, as shown in the figure below, but many contexts are valid. In my framework, review means building … Continue reading →

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Business Model Canvas

Like the balanced scorecard technique I described yesterday, I view the business model canvas technique as a way to get analysts to look at organizations in a different way. It is used fairly commonly (though I had never seen nor … Continue reading →

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Balanced Scorecard

I have never explicitly used this technique, but I have certainly examined problems, systems, and opportunities from all the perspectives contained within it. This is true of many techniques described in the BABOK. I often note that every formalized technique … Continue reading →

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Concept Modeling

A concept model, or conceptual model, is an abstract representation of an organization, process, system, or product. It relates the nouns and verbs and other categorizations within and between elements. It can take any arbitrary form, in contrast with the … Continue reading →

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Extended Engagement Life Cycle

When creating a new project, engagement, or product from scratch, we should think in terms of its full life cycle. For this reason I have drawn the diagram of my business analysis engagement framework with two extra cycles. One shows … Continue reading →

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