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What do business analysts actually do?
Mostly it appears that business analysts roam around drawing things on whiteboards, but people seem to be luckier when they have a BA doing it
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This is why we find agile testers so annoying
I won’t try to explain the conversation that led to this “story card”. But suffice to say there was an agile tester there.
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Collaborative problem solving with affinity diagrams
Not many people seem to know what an affinity diagram is, but most project teams seem to have used them. So maybe I am using the wrong term for the process of “writing ideas on a post-it note and then whacking them up on a wall”. In my defence though, most seem to have mixed…
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Defining the value or your internal consulting team part 3 – reviewing your services
In my last couple of articles I described a rough process for creating a value proposition for an internal consulting team. To do this I used “Sophie” and her mythical business analyst team as an example. Now we are going to go one step further. Sophie can already explain the services her team offers, but…
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Defining the value of your internal consulting team part 2 – your services
In my last article, I described an approach that you can use to define the purpose of an internal consulting team. I used Sophie and her BA team as an example and I will continue to do so here. This time I will talk about the “Service catalogue” or list of services that your team…
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Defining the brand and value of your internal consulting team – part 1
I am just moving back into consulting after a 2 year gig as a CTO. So people are already asking me about the brand, services and focus of my consulting company. I guess it is time to start creating my value proposition, visual language and case studies so that I can get back into marketing.…
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History of the world in 3 sentences – will history repeat for start ups?
According to an article I was reading in an HBR blog, Western Europe came to dominate the world over the long time period from 950AD to 1850AD for 3 reasons. They stopped Elites from expropriating property (ie they stopped rich vested interests from being able to steal anything anyone else created). They made contracts enforceable. The created a…
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Building the minimum user journey according to Guru Kok Chiann
I am meant to be writing about office politics but have been distracted by our major release (http://www.iconnect360.com/standard/). That is over so I can get back to blogging. But rather than writing an article I thought I would steal some ideas from well known product design guru “KC” Kok Chiann. Regular readers of this blog…
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Which is more important: clear requirements at the start or good collaboration?
I have been struggling with how to improve our development team output lately. We have managed to get 20% to 40% faster with better quality over the last couple of quarters so I am pretty happy with that. We have flip-flopper (er experimented) with better requirements and modeling before a sprint or lighter up-front requirements…
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The dark art of politics – do you need values or a brand to win battles?
Some people believe that if you are evil then you have no values and that you will be good at office politics, but that if you are good then you will have strong values and be really bad at office politics. I believe that regardless of whether you are good or evil, you will be…
James King 