Your success metrics should start providing value for the project from Day 1, well before the results are measured.  Let me start off with the key point so that you don’t have to read all the way through to get there:  the purpose of creating success metrics is to begin action in a purposeful direction [...]

9/22/11 IMPORTANT NOTE AND UPDATE: We have updated the criteria and tool scores — please go to this post for the most current material. Also, there is a known issue for Excel 2003 users that is fixed in the update – click here for the updated material that addresses this issue. We have decided to [...]

Rather than being given the time they need to create well-crafted requirements, business analysts are often required to create their requirements specifications under an imposed deadline. This practice typically leads to stressed business analysts and poor requirements because either the requirements aren’t all documented or they are poorly documented. Occasionally the business analyst gets the [...]

We once had a client that had a project that had veered off the path by miles. This project was millions of dollars over budget and was on the hit list to be potentially canceled. The company decided that this project was a must-have, so it had to figure out how to make it successful. [...]

We perform peer reviews on our projects to ensure better deliverable quality. They also provide a very nice mentoring tool to help each other grow. In general though, as business analysts, even if it’s not a required part of your process, you should periodically have someone take a look at your work as an opportunity [...]

At Seilevel we take business requirements gathering seriously- but we still like to have fun. So on a recent project, our efforts took us to one of our customer’s remote locations, since that was where several departments are located, and we needed to elicit requirements from those subject matter experts. As we prepared for our [...]

Play-Doh. We know it, we love it, we’ve been tempted to eat it when we were wee lads. So why is everybody’s favorite moldable material making an appearance in a software requirements blog? For starters, it works wonders to raise the fun factor of any elicitation session. Give a room full of subject matter experts [...]

In my blog post about avoiding reviewer fatigue, one of the things I mentioned was following all of the guidelines for creating a consumable deliverable.  Deliverables  may take many forms—a word document with use cases, a visio document of models, an excel spreadsheet of wonderful information, etc.  Regardless of the form, the deliverable needs to [...]

Business Analyst training would not be complete without an example of a Traceability Matrix. We walk through an example of a traceability matrix used in software requirements gathering in video eighteen. Send us an email if you’d like to learn more about business analyst training. If you’d like to see our entire business analyst training [...]

The Traceability Matrix is a necessary model in all software requirments gathering projects. We discuss what traceability matrices are and how to use them in Video Seventeen. We also cover the fact that the Traceability Matrix requires a tool to do both forward and backward traceability for software requirments gathering. We cover what forward and [...]