Why do some products and companies fail, where others succeed. Based on surveys spanning 3,000 companies, 40,000 individuals and one-on-one interviews with 30 technology CEOs, Pragmatic Marketing found seven consistent success factors related to company culture, management style, and product & marketing strategies that propelled the winners. And also the seven fatal flaws that derail market laggards.

Article provides an overview of twelve rules for writing good requirements. Each rule has its own page (linked from this one).

An excellent introduction to, overview of and fairly comprehensive discussion on continuous integrations. Here's an excerpt from the page: "Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily - leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly. This article is a quick overview of Continuous Integration summarizing the technique and its current usage."

rather a database than an article. useful, however!

If you read the article I linked to in my last post you read that Peter Morris thinks the PMBOK is too limited and that a more holistic framework of managing projects for success is required. He believes the body of knowledge must go beyond the pure PM techniques and include what is necessary for success for it to be a truly useful PMBOK. Extending the idea further for business analysts; Is the IIBA making a mistake by constraining the BABOK to what is unique about the role. Is it unique anyway - see the SWEBOK as an example of overlap. Shouldn't the IIBA work out what the key success criteria are for BAs and make that the foundation of the BABOK?

Project success relies upon more than just building the right tools and handing them over. In the late nineties the ADKAR change management model was developed by Prosci as a process for managing people through organisational change. Read more at Better Projects Blog.

Question: How does a large software project get to be one year late? Answer: One day at a time. In 1975 Professor Fred Brooks wrote a book called the Mythical Man Month which was full of good ideas and observations on how to successfully blow a project schedule and budget out. Are tey still relevent 30 years later?

Both a business analyst and a project manager operate as consultants to a client organisation, and project teams operate as service delivery organisations. The RATER service quality framework is a good tool for project teams and team members to manage the quality of service to our clients. Read more about RATER at the Better Projects Blog

The Business Analysts Handbook has been launched by myself and a handful of friends and colleagues. From it's homepage; "This is a wiki for busness analysts to post thir knowledge. It is designed to be an evolving repository of knowledge for and about business analysts, or BAs." This site can be viewed as a business analysts body of knowledge, although rather that a formal and rigidly version controlled document such as PMIs PMBOK (or the proposed BABOK) my hope is that the wiki format will enable a broader contribution from practitioners and be a (cliché warning) live document, that evolves as the knowledge base grows.

As business evolves into the 21st Century, and as your career as a project worker develops the complexity of the environment escalates and so does the scale of projects you work on and the potential costs of failure. So risk management becomes more and more crucial to managing better projects. Over the next half dozen projects I am going to post a Risk management 101 series of articles running through the key areas of project risk management:

Raising a risk

Risk management systems

Describing a risk

Assess a risk

Manage a risk

Monitor a risk Read more at Better Projects Blog