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 [...]

Networking ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. That’s my theory. I spent a few minutes today glancing through updates and group discussions. It’s all terribly dreary. Is it the difficult economy and competitive job market that seems to have turned us all into bots repeating our “personal brand” to anyone near enough to hear? [...]

It’s that time of year again and we’re looking for the next Rock Star to intern with us. As this is our second year with the program, we’re excited to be in another intern recruiting season. We understand that college students may not have any corporate experience or any experience with software programs commonly used [...]

Complexity science is a scientific discipline that studies the behavior of complex systems. So what does it have to do with software and product requirements? As you’ll learn, quite a bit.   Almost everything we encounter in the world is part of a complex adaptive system (CAS). John Holland, a MacArthur Fellow and professor of [...]

How do you successfully navigate something like three separate business analyst lead changes in four months, where the team lead knows vital information about the team’s role in the larger project? By being prepared for change, and using the following process to make for smoother transitions. When the lead of a project changes, the first [...]

Burndowns are a key tool for requirements projects; they give everyone an estimate of how much work is left and how long it will take to complete the project.  However people will commonly make mistakes in their usage of burndowns and this can lead to all sorts of issues.  Here are a couple of the [...]

Why don’t projects ever go according to plan?  Because your plan is wrong.  Worse, it is supposed to be wrong.  Why?  Because you’re not omniscient and can’t predict the future.   When you make your initial project plan, there is a lot you don’t know.  And even if you did know everything about every aspect [...]

Argot, colloquialism, lexicon, palaver, rigmarole, vernacular.  What do all these words have in common?  They are specialized language about… specialized language. Today, everyone’s workplace has smatterings of acronyms, initialisms and other terms that you and I as outsiders would have no idea about.  When I first came to Seilevel and started working as a business [...]

One of the administrative tasks that so many people seem to hate to do is writing a status report.  A status report is a short, informative report that states the status of a project.  I’ve spoken to numerous people about writing status reports, and almost universally the reaction is “ ‘heavy sigh’ Do I really [...]

Every area of life has assumptions. Sometimes, you may not even think about them. That’s just the nature of taking things for granted. Need proof? The first statement of this entry was an assumption and you agreed wholeheartedly. To a business analyst, assumptions are the foundation on which good analysis is built. If the assumptions have [...]