- Homepage
-
On the one hand, I always ask the same questions
I have always believed that a good business analyst will be able to work on any project because he or she will ask good questions. At the same time though I have always believed that different projects need different approaches and therefore potentially different skills. Which begs the question – should our approach to starting…
-
Why should we do this project? So what?
If we don’t know why we are doing a project, then maybe we shouldn’t be doing it. But on many projects, if you ask the team “what will be different when we finish?” they look confused and start talking about the tasks they are performing. But the tasks being performed should be moving toward some…
-
Creating a basic communication plan
The world’s simplest communication plan might be this one: Who I am communicating with? What should I be telling them? How should I communicate with them? Even thinking about those three questions on the bus on your way to work might help create better communication. But I thought I would break the questions down to come…
-
Categorising projects – what kind of project is this?
As I mentioned in my last post, I have been pondering how to apply some of the ideas from a book called “Stand Back and Deliver” to my own work.
-
Stealing ideas from Stand Back and Deliver
I am running an “advanced BA course” next week and as part of the course we will be exploring the concept of strategy from a business analysts point of view. One of the trainers I work with (Shane) recommended we provide the participants with a book called “Stand Back and Deliver” by Pollyanna Pixton, Niel…
-
A course on change management in the real world
I spend a lot of time training teams in new approaches like agile development, but most of this training is about new techniques themselves rather than the process of managing the adoption and acceptance of those techniques. I also spend a lot of time coaching project managers in how to run more effective projects, but…
-
Signing in from Canberra
I have been to Australia’s capital city twice in the last month to run training courses. I stayed in different hotels each trip and noticed that they had slightly different approaches to making me feel welcome. Both offered breakfast, though neither did it very well. Both had friendly staff and both had the same overall…
-
Measuring the impact on production support
I was running a course in agile development when I mentioned that one of the good things about agile is being able go live with something valuable sooner. One of the class asked whether you can measure the benefit of going live sooner. “Of course,” I replied, “and of course you should be doing so”.…
-
Agile documentation: Handover to production support
What knowledge does a production support team need when a project goes live? And what do project teams actually give them? Some agile teams catapult story cards across to the support team with no thought as to whether these will be of any use to anyone. Even worse, some teams think that being “agile” means…
-
Creating stories for the support team on an agile project
This article is one of a couple I am writing to explain how agile projects can hand over useful information to support teams if they want to. So this article is a (hopefully) straightforward description of how we can use stories to define the knowledge that to create and handover when the project goes live.
James King 