Card sorting – agile BA technique 158

Card sorting is a simple and useful way to gather feedback on which features people want in a new system, which problems they want solve or generally speaking, what they want. So I was surprised recently when some business analysts I was working with had not heard of the technique and I thought I would […]

Is it enough to say that the BA is the “universal translator” between business and IT?

I often hear that we need a business analyst to translate what the business people say, so that technical people understand them. Then, I am told we need the BA to then translate what the technical people say, so that the business people understand them. I guess it goes something like this: It sounds good, […]

Can I still use a use case on my agile project – even if the cool kids don’t use them anymore?

I have been told that use cases are very old fashioned now and that all the cool people have moved onto agile user stories. But I am old school and I still like to pull the old approaches out every now and then and take them for a spin. I found myself explaining use cases […]

Using a moments of truth analysis to assess a team’s readiness for change

I have previously blogged about a number of approaches to assessing a team’s readiness for change, including the 7-S framework and the arenas of change approach, but today I thought I would explain a less well known approach – the “moments of truth” assessment. Actually I made it up so it is not too well […]

Preparing for a stakeholder interview part two – using the GRIFT model

The goal of your interview is the single most important thing to know before the interview, but it is also useful to know a bit more about what you are hoping to achieve before you start the interview. So that is where I use the powerful “GRIFT” model to do my preparations. Actually it is […]

Preparing for a stakeholder interview part one – setting a clear goal

You might be surprised to find out that people often turn up to interview a stakeholder with little or no preparation. You would probably not be surprised to find out though, that when the interviewer is poorly prepared, the interview results in a conversation without a real resolution and the interviewer has missed an opportunity […]

OODA Loops for fighter pilots, business analysts and testers

When I started to learn agile approaches to projects, OODA was all the rage, but it seems to have disappeared from view as modern agilistas move from Scrum to lean to Kanban to ultra-velocitus development. I guess I am still a bit old school, because I still think the OODA loop is the essence of […]