I remember when I was at the university and I took the class "Data Management." At that time, learning database schema design was challenging because we only had a blackboard, sheets of paper, pencils...
A simple-to-use data modeling tool. Verse 1 in the 12 Days of … Our gift to you this season is wrapping up our favorite blogs about a product into a collection, with a song to go with each! Each week ...
How do you think companies feel about returned merchandise or a cancellation? I worked with PayPal for a period of time to help them decrease churn (their equivalent of a service cancellation). Trust...
Lessons Learned You may have heard Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I'm constantly surprised at how often companies don't ta...
Iterative and Incremental Delopment Are you challenged with getting your stakeholders to agree on one requirement? If so, don't feel alone. It's not uncommon as a business analyst to be stuck in the i...
Pair Programming Pair programming was another fantastic but contentious idea that emerged from the agile movement of the 1990s. Pair programming is when two developers physically sit and work together...
Test Driven Design The adoption of agile development is clearly on the rise and with it comes–at least the consideration for–Test Driven Design (TDD). Although the decision to embrace TDD in your deve...
Expert Advice Whose advice are you listening to when building your requirements? Sure, your end users think they know what they want, but are they the right people to assist you in designing a solutio...
Why End Users Don't Like Their Solution One of the biggest problems facing your job as a business analyst is unhappy end users. Sometimes it feels like you're more of a therapist than a business analy...
My biggest motivator for understanding project management was working with bad project managers. I'm usually not this critical, but if you're stuck on a project with a bad project manager, things are ...
Do you use surveys to conduct analysis for your requirements? My guess is no. But I hope that will change after reading this article. Surveys are a great way to collect data to support your analyses. ...
Too Many Words We've all heard that a picture's worth a thousand words and I would say that's a conservative number. The right picture has the ability to convey tens of thousands of words if it's stru...
