Seilevel will be at the University of Texas Career Expo on September 8th.  The expo is being held at the McCombs School of Business. We will be there talking to current business students about a career path as a Requirements Analyst/ Business Analyst. We are looking for people who: are excited to learn completely new subject [...]

Over my professional years, I have learned one really important life lesson: Every time I make a mistake, I learn a lot. So I was thinking about that in the context of being a business analysts. I believe that making mistakes is not such a bad thing and instead should be seen as a wonderful [...]

On our projects we are often asked to provide our requirements to the development teams with business prioritization.  I’ve been in meetings with my business stakeholders where we  have sat in front of a list of requirements and attempted to prioritize them one by one.  In my experience, this effort ended up prioritizing the list [...]

Being a relatively new Requirements Analyst/ Business Analyst (BA) and being new to the industry, I have been blessed with the opportunity to have mentors. Receiving direction from more experienced BA’s has definitely helped me find areas that I can improve on, while at the same time, finding my strengths and improving those too. Yet there still [...]

Last year, I wrote about my Lessons from a Bad Haircut.  I’m please to say I finally have a lesson from a good haircut. How did I finally get a good haircut? It was what the stylist did after I explained what I wanted.  She drew a quick sketch.  It took about 15 seconds.  And, [...]

This is the typical response received when we suggest using a formal requirement management tool. “Doesn’t MS Word provide enough functionality  to manage requirements? We’ve been using it and it’s worked fine for us so far.” It may be simple to jot ideas and start writing requirements in a Word document, or any other text [...]

I’ve worked on at least one project now and heard of several others where a super-secret development team works in parallel to solve the same business problem as the “official” IT project team.  A coworker of mine coined the term “IT Black Ops” to refer to these sorts of projects where the business, either out [...]

One of my good friends recently changed jobs. For several years he was working with a fairly large software developer that loved to boast that they always had positive margins, always showed growth. I guess it isn’t too hard when you create nearly fixed cost products that can be resold over and over. From my [...]

Lately we have run into a number of projects that focus on reporting and analytics. As always our job is to determine the requirements. For analytics and reporting however, the requirements are a bit different than a traditional functional based portion of the system. We use a couple of different models, the report table, report flows, [...]

Number 5 in the series, “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: 7 ways to do software requirements poorly to set your project up for failure and what to do instead.” Short-change Time Spent on Software Requirements or Don’t do Them at All Don’t Listen to Your Customer’s Needs Don’t use Models Use Weasel Words [...]