Category Archives: Consulting

Articles providing guidance or insight as it relates to IT consulting.

Ten Supercharged Active Listening Skills To Make You More Successful

By Scott Sehlhorst | March 15th, 2007

Active listening is about more than gaining understanding. Active listening is about giving. Giving assurance that you understand someone’s needs. Giving confidence that you will address those needs. Giving feedback and acknowledgement that someone’s input is valuable. If you haven’t tried active listening, you may think it is a passive, receptive activity. Active listening skills will help you guide your customers and your team to do the right thing, and enjoy the experience.

Posted in Communication, Consulting, Lists, Requirements, Requirements gathering | Tagged active listening, active listening skills, effective listening skills, eliciting requirements, gathering requirements, managing data, requirements elicitation, Requirements gathering | 16 Comments

How To Visualize Stakeholder Analysis

By Scott Sehlhorst | March 13th, 2007

The first step of gathering requirements is to identify who can give you the requirements. Business processes include communication between different people inside the organization. Communication also includes people outside the organization. When gathering requirements, it can be easy to overlook the people who don’t use the software directly. Those people may still be stakeholders. Read on to see how to approach stakeholder analysis.

Posted in Business Analysis, Communication, Consulting, Requirements, Requirements Models, Requirements gathering | Tagged business analyst, business process, business processes, business requirements, business system analysis, gathering requirements, managing data, onion diagram, requirement completeness, requirements elicitation, requirements management, stakeholder analysis | 4 Comments

Effective Communication of Requirements

By Scott Sehlhorst | March 7th, 2007

Effective communication of requirements requires more than documentation and broadcasting. Effective communication requires interaction and collaboration. Alistair Cockburn addresses this in his analysis of project successes and modes of communication.

Posted in Business Analysis, Communication, Consulting, Presentation, Requirements, Writing | Tagged active listening, alistair cockburn, communication of requirements, effective communication, managing data, people trump process, product requirements management | 2 Comments

Project Dashboard Icons

By Scott Sehlhorst | February 23rd, 2007

We create project dashboards all the time to show status, or to give upper management an update. Dashboards and scorecards are great for giving us a “quick view” into the health of a project – they give us a way to drill down. Many of us use the colors red / yellow / green, with a stoplight metaphor. The problem is that some of us are colorblind. Johanna Rothman gives us a GREAT tip.

Posted in Communication, Consulting, Presentation, Project Management | Tagged create a project dashboard, managing data, project dashboard, project plan scorecard, project status report, status report format | 7 Comments

Writing Stylish Requirements

By Scott Sehlhorst | January 5th, 2007

You knew it would happen eventually, the big ten rules of writing requirements has become the big twelve rules. Maybe scope creep isn’t such a bad thing after all. Writing style plays an important role in writing requirements too.

Posted in Business Analysis, Product Management, Requirements, Writing | Tagged business requirements documentation, good requirements, managing data, product requirements, requirements documentation, software requirements, stylish requirements, writing business requirements, writing requirements | 4 Comments

Crossing The Desert With Bad Project Planning

By Scott Sehlhorst | January 4th, 2007

Johanna Rothman recently wrote an article with a poignant introduction: “A project team focuses on an interim milestone, works like the devil to meet that milestone. They meet the milestone, look up, and realize they’re not at the end of the project–they still have to finish the darn thing. They’re living the Crossing the Desert syndrome.” Fixing it isn’t enough – how do we prevent it from happening?

Logical Requirements

By Scott Sehlhorst | December 4th, 2006

We talk about characteristics of good requirements, including completeness, correctness, and ambiguity. But how do we assure that our requirements are complete, correct, and unambiguous? Simple, Captain, with logic.

Posted in Communication, Requirements, Writing | Tagged ambiguous requirements, complete requirements, correct requirements, documenting requirements, incomplete requirements, incorrect requirements, logical requirements, managing data, requirements writing, unambiguous requirements, writing good requirements, writing requirements | 1 Comment

Pairing Business Analysts

By Scott Sehlhorst | November 20th, 2006

Pair programming is a bit of a foreign concept for many people in business. A few years ago, it was foreign to most programmers too. Pair programming is a powerful technique for software development because it allows two people to look at the same problem/solution from two different perspectives at the same time. Would that same approach work for business analysis?

Posted in Business Analysis, Requirements, Writing | Tagged business analysts, managing data, pair programming | 3 Comments

Writing Correct Requirements

By Scott Sehlhorst | October 30th, 2006

We ran a series called Writing Good Requirements – The Big Ten Rules in May 2006. Bloggers are notorious for not being able to count. We had ten rules at the time, and now we’re adding an eleventh. Writing Correct Requirements may have been the unwritten rule, but now we take a look at it.