This article is an informed and wide ranging history of the profession/role of the business analyst.  Written by a developer for developers to help understand the role and how to work with them.

An introductory article about making sure you vesion control and maintain traceability over your requirements.

Requirements traceability is an important asect of good requirements management.  If you are new to requirements management or business analysis this is a good introduction to some good practices.

The article is written in the context of implementing knowledge management strategies and it talks about a quality approach to project execution and requirements management.

This includes the importance of reconciling the details with the strategic direction when documentaing and managing corporate knowledge.

This is a useful article for anyone getting involved in the development of Knowledge Management systems or Business Process systems and Repositories.

This link is to a series of blog posts on the V-model.  The V-model is a testing and validation framework for software development projects.

This article is useful for business analysts new to the software development world and highlights key quality gates in the development and implementation of software.  The articles focus on what a Business Analyst or Project Manager should know about the process.

The individual posts listed are

<font>Introduction</font>

<font>The value of testing</font>

<font>The V-Model and the development process</font>

<font>Verifying on the way into the development cycle</font>

<font>Testing and verifying on the way out of the development cycle</font>

<font>Extending the V-Model</font>

 

A short article on stakeholders for PMs and BAs. Covers what is a stakeholder, the cyclical approach to stakeholder management and the influence engagement model.

"The definition of a stakeholder is controversial. For example, project team members are generally not considered stakeholders, but in virtual teams, across matrix companies, they may be stakeholders, as their roles extend to beyond the project. They are thus committed more to their local business unit than the project’s success and have an impact on whether the project goes ahead and whether it is considered successful..."

A short article on stakeholders for PMs and BAs. Covers what is a stakeholder, the cyclical approach to stakeholder management and the influence engagement model. "The definition of a stakeholder is controversial. For example, project team members are generally not considered stakeholders, but in virtual teams, across matrix companies, they may be stakeholders, as their roles extend to beyond the project. They are thus committed more to their local business unit than the project’s success and have an impact on whether the project goes ahead and whether it is considered successful..."

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

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.

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

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?