In a survey of over 500 senior business and technology executives done by the MIT Sloan School of Management, only 18% say that their company’s IT spending was “highly aligned with business priorities.” This means that in 82% of organizations, IT is consistently spending time and money on projects that were not addressing the actual [...]

We have had a lot of discussions internally about “Measuring Project Success.”  At an extremely simplistic level, Seilevel defines success as having been achieved when all the business objectives identified for the project are met. Each business objective will have one or more success metric(s) defined for it. So, when we are able to measure [...]

The first elicitation session on a new project, in unchartered territory with a new Subject Matter Expert (SME), can be challenging. You must ask questions and facilitate conversation to chip away at the business problem.  Seven weeks ago, I began a series of “elicitation sessions” in a brand new topic- motherhood. Unfortunately, my little SME [...]

What 5 measures can you use as personal objectives? On the modern analyst forum, Andrea asked the question “I have been asked to come up with 5 personal “Management Business Objectives” for myself in my position as Business Systems Analyst. I need to have them by the end of January and I can’t really come [...]

At the end of the first quarter of 2012 there was a slight fluttering through the wind chimes of business journals, technology news sites, Google plus, twitter, and Facebook: Red Hat, the producers of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and sponsors of the Fedora Project, had become the first billion-dollar open source software company. [...]

Here at Seilevel, when we begin a new project, we typically start off by asking a fundamental question, “Why is this project valuable to our client?” Establishing a “Why” guides the effort, allowing us to understand which areas of the project offer the greatest monetary return. To do this, we create the Business Objectives Model, [...]

A recent and massive ERP software project failure ($1 Billion US) made me wonder…what issues may there have been for the Business Analyst organizations involved? For the the software requirements definition process? I posted my questions, and a link to “What went wrong? U.S. Airforce blows $1 billion on failed enterprise software”, to the IIBA [...]

In software requirements, the Business Objectives Model is key to delivering value for the business. This software requirements model traces the connection between key problems a business faces and the eventual product they produce. Creating this model is arguably the first and most important step we take here at Seilevel before defining a solution, and [...]

In my last blog post about using visual software requirements models to inform my home buying experience, I laid out my business reasons for wanting to own a home (in the Business Objectives Model), my desired features in the dream home (in the Feature Tree), and how I was going to measure houses against each [...]

“I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.” Isaac Asimov, via Brainy Quote As business analysts, it is critical that we understand the importance of speed and performance to users in the applications we are designing, especially when we are replacing legacy applications. And I have found that asking users direct questions on performance [...]