6 Essential Questions for Interface Analysis
Quick – when I say “interface analysis”, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? If I had to guess, I’d guess that you pictured a screen prototype. So many of the interfaces we work with are just that – screens used by humans to interact with a software solution. However, there are lots […]
Am I a Data Analyst or a Business Analyst?
There’s a lot of terminology floating around out there relating to data analysis. What’s a data analyst? What is data analysis? Is that different from data analytics? Where does business analysis fit in? Unfortunately, a lot of these terms get used interchangeably. That’s compounded by the fact that there’s a lot of overlap between the […]
AI and the Crucial Role of Business Rule Analysis and Management
I love analyzing business rules. Early in my career I spent time working in the artificial intelligence field. Believe it or not, AI actually existed before ChatGPT! A lot of the early work in AI revolved around what are known as “rules engines”. Rules engines interpret business rules that have been captured in a user-friendly […]
6 Mantras for Managing Self-Organizing Teams
In Part 1 of this blog post, I put a new spin on an old set of “commandments” that I learned early in my career. Drawn from a book given to me by a key mentor, those commandments encouraged me to challenge the very hierarchical environment in which I worked. Our organization structure looked like […]
The Reality of Organizing a Self-Organizing Team
As I was thinking about writing on the topic of self-organizing teams, I ran a Google search to see what popped up. All the top-level results were references from agile sites like scrum.org. That would lead one to believe that the concept of self-organizing teams is new, something that was somehow invented along with agile […]
3 Key Factors for Building an Elicitation Plan
I really love teaching. I guess that’s not surprising, given that I’m (at least) a fourth-generation teacher. Check this out: This is a clip from the 1920 Wyoming Census. The first entry on this page, Gertrude Shaw, is my great-grandmother. Widowed at 29 with three children to support, she taught in a one-room schoolhouse in […]
7 Guidelines for Achieving Business Process Improvement Project Success
I like to focus on the positive. I’m the person who skips right over the headlines about attacks and shootings to get to the stories that make me feel good. I figured out a few years ago that if something was really important and world altering, somebody in my family would tell me about it […]
Going Beyond the “Who” to Analyze Stakeholders
Maybe it’s just me, but I frequently find that the most challenging aspect of a project is the people. We refer to the people involved in a project as “stakeholders”. Just knowing who your stakeholders are isn’t enough. We need to analyze stakeholders and develop a thorough understanding of them in order to work effectively […]
Measuring Agility: It’s Not The Same
Metrics of the Past Have Taught Us A Lesson Many traditional KPIs can instigate and proliferate bad behaviors in software development. In the past, programmers have measured their progress by how many lines of code they’ve written, quality was measured by the number of bugs fixed, and user needs were considered met by checking off […]
Keep Calm and Limit WIP
Twas the night of Thanksgiving,And all through the houseAll the dishes were readyThe food was set outAnd while we were eating,Just out of the blue,It hit: the newsletter!!Oh, what do we do?! Our oldest child does a lot of the artwork and graphics for B2T4U, our monthly newsletter. While cleaning up after Thanksgiving dinner, they […]
