Category Archives: Management

Iteration and Feedback: The Key to Making Projects and Teams Work

The Product Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) teaches that most project failures are caused by poor team dynamics. That may be true, but that’s just a specific case of a larger problem. The more foundational idea is that trouble arises … Continue reading

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Unified Theory of Business Analysis: Part Four

How Different Management Styles Work Solutions, and let’s face it, those quite often involve the development and modification of software these days, can be realized in the context of many different types of organization. A lot of bandwidth is expended … Continue reading

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Unified Theory of Business Analysis: Part Three

How The Most Commonly Used Software Tools Apply to the Solution Effort and the Engagement Effort Continuing last week’s discussions I wanted to analyze how business analysts tend to apply their favorite software tools. Excel (24) Microsoft Excel is such … Continue reading

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Unified Theory of Business Analysis: Part Two

How The Fifty Business Analysis Techniques Apply to the Solution Effort and the Engagement Effort Yesterday I kicked off this discussion by clarifying the difference between the solution effort and the engagement effort. Again, the solution effort involves the work … Continue reading

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Unified Theory of Business Analysis: Part One

Defining and Distinguishing Between the Solution Effort and the Engagement Effort There seems to be a great deal of confusion in describing what business analysts do, since they often seem to be doing such different things. I’ve confirmed this after … Continue reading

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Communicating With Leaders

Yesterday I attended the Tampa IIBA’s chapter meeting to see the presentation given by Kara Sundar, titled Communicating With Leaders: Increase Your Productivity and Influence. The presentation was very effective and based on materials from the book Change Intelligence by … Continue reading

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Follow-up: A Way To Use Jira for Everything?

Today I continue yesterday’s discussion of ways to implement an RTM and my framework using Jira, except this time I want to talk about using Jira for every phase of an effort and not just for implementation and testing. Given … Continue reading

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Jira and Confluence for RTMs and My Framework

I finally finished the Udemy course on Jira and Confluence. As I watched each section of the course I thought about how the capabilities of the two products can be used to represent Requirements Traceability Matrices, and furthermore how they … Continue reading

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Pittsburgh IIBA Meetup: Do You Think You Are a Good Listener? Let Us Surprise You!

This evening’s talk at the Pittsburgh IIBA Meetup was about communication skills. Although there was some discussion about conveying messages the emphasis was on how to receive them. Both are important to business analysts. BAs must provide context for what … Continue reading

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Of Pencils, the Division of Labor, Building Teams, and Knowing What the Heck Is Going On

The conversation at the watering hole after this evening’s CharmCityJS Meetup was interesting as usual. In between talking with and encouraging some of the younger attendees and speakers I spoke with a senior developer about a contract he was finishing … Continue reading

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