Business stakeholders want projects to deliver fast. They often come to the project team with a clear view of the solution, expecting a quick start and not leaving much room or time for challenging and proposing alternatives. However, this mindset carries an important risk: building the solution does not guarantee business value.
Continue readingAh, MVPs, or Minimum Viable Products. I haven’t seen many projects without them in the last few years. Yet still, I haven’t seen project success rates going up significantly either, despite what MVPs promise: building the smallest thing that will bring success. What are we doing wrong? What can we improve?
Continue reading… who’s the rightest of them all?
The insight that we do not know everything, and that we should validate our ideas with customers, is taking root in most organisations. A customer survey is often the go to tool to do so. But there’s a catch.
Continue readingIt’s a question I was recently asked by someone wanting to evolve into a BA role. I gave it some thought and came up with the following answer:
Curiosity
Why curiosity?
Continue readingIs working fun? Are your projects joyful? Claudia Michalik’s BA Game at the 2019 Business Analysis pre-conference workshops clearly showed me they could be, and perhaps even should be.
Meetings where people are talking but not listening, workshops where laptops and smartphones scream for participants' attention, conversations that go around in circles, …
As it becomes more difficult to grab people's attention and focus, meeting and workshop facilitation becomes an essential part of the analyst's toolkit. Whether you are business analyst, product owner, scrum master, user experience designer or customer journey expert, simply getting people to forget about their busy day when they enter your meeting room is key to getting to a valuable result.
Susanne Schmidt-Rauch, a Swiss 'UXlerin', visited our latest BA & Beyond conference in March, where she talked herself about how user experience complements business analysis. She wrote about her learnings and experience recently. Very interesting to read how a UX person perceives business analysis! It's in German, but I've hand-picked a few key points that stick with me. Thanks for your article, Susanne!
Many organisations are experimenting with applying agile techniques. However, without a good understanding of the agile mindset, this often does not lead to the expected results. At the latest BBC Conference, I talked to Kathy Berkidge, who frequently speaks on agile and how it enables good collaboration. She also discusses the relation of agile and mindfulness, which is maybe a bit unexpected but can be a big enabler!
Globalisation enables us to bring the best people from all around the world together virtually to create successful teams. At the same time, even people that work together physically have a lot of virtual interactions. At the latest BBC Conference, I talked to Penny Pullan, author and frequent speaker on facilitation and virtual working, which isn’t all that virtual after all.
Adrian is a well known and frequent speaker at conferences around the world. At the latest BBC Conference, we had the chance to discuss systems thinking and how this is relevant for business analysis.
