Quick Tips
Best Practices From our Experts
Let’s face it, business analysis is hard. While there is a lot of advice available to help in your analysis work, it can be hard to sort through it all to find the take aways that will help you most. Our business analysis quick tips can help.
We asked our in-house experts and other business analysis practitioners for their best advice on several key business analysis topics. From this crowd-sourcing activity, we developed these business analysis quick tips to share best practices and ideas for improving your performance as a business analyst.
Ensuring Quality in the Context Diagram Quick Tip
How to Improve Your Requirements Gathering Techniques
Elicitation is one of the most basic tasks of a business analysis professional. Unfortunately, choosing from the vast list of requirements gathering techniques and performing good elicitation that yields value isn’t as easy as you might initially think. There is a lot of planning and thought that needs to go into performing successful elicitation.
How to Improve Your Stakeholder Engagement Quick Tip
You could know all the elicitation analysis techniques in the book, but if you don’t have the right people, engaged at the right time, providing the right input – you won’t get very far. Making an effort to improve stakeholder engagement can significantly impact your effectiveness as a business analyst.
How to Think Like an Agile Analyst Quick Tip
There’s a difference between “doing agile” and “being agile”. Following an approach like DevOps, Scrum or Kanban can help us “do agile”. In order to “be agile” we have to embrace a change in mindset.
Leveraging the Context Data Flow Diagram Quick Tip
Scope creep is a project killer. One way to help prevent scope creep is to clearly document your project’s scope at the onset. A valuable tool for defining and communicating scope that we teach in class is the Context Data Flow Diagram. Are you getting the most out of this diagram?
Potential First Questions to Ask When Starting a Project Quick Tip
Ever been assigned to a project and not sure where to start? Don’t worry, you are not alone. Our experts and other business analysts have been in that position too.
How to Create a High Performing Team Quick Tip
Most of your work life is likely spent in a team environment. As the pace of work continues to quicken, it’s apparent now more than ever that a fluid, high performing team is essential to your success.
How to Improve Remote Facilitation and Collaboration Quick Tip
As co-located teams are becoming more and more of the norm, virtual collaboration can be a challenge. Our experts have compiled a list of some of their recommendations and ideas to help you overcome many of the long-distance hurdles you will encounter in a virtual world.
How to Successfully Prioritize Requirements Quick Tip
It can be difficult to get stakeholders to define priorities for requirements. It’s all important, right? But if everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent. Effective priorities are critical for making the best use of your stakeholders’ time and the organizations resources. There are lots of approaches to prioritization, and many different factors must be taken into consideration.
Jakob’s Ten Usability Heuristics Quick Tip
Twenty-five years ago, Jakob Nielsen created a timeless set of 10 usability heuristics. Our Quick Tips provides an explanation of the 10 heuristics and can be used as a checklist when reviewing an interface.
Potential Areas for Process Improvement Quick Tip
Why is process improvement so difficult sometimes? Shouldn’t it be easy to recognize the best way to restructure or reengineer a process? No, it can be challenging to determine the best approach and know how to get started.
Questions to Ask About Business Rules Quick Tip
Analyzing a business rule involves a lot more than just writing the rule down or developing a model to represent it. These tips help you start thinking about additional rules properties that need to be elicited.
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