May 16, 2018
Lean strategy execution and the BA’s new roles
Many executives admit they struggle with turning their strategy into a business reality. What can business analysis do about it?
sharing insights on innovation in established organisations
altershape blog
November 29, 2017
Are you also iterating towards failure?
So your team is working hard, iterating on your product, getting customer feedback along the way and turning it into a great solution. But are you sure you are going in the right direction?
May 4, 2017
First test, then invest
During trainings and workshops, I often tell about the Zappos example to explain the concepts of hypotheses and cheap validation. How many pairs of shoes did Zappos have in stock when they first launched their web site? Zero.
One time, after the Zappos example, I got an interesting question, showing how hard it is to grasp the essence of hypothesis discovery and validation.
October 26, 2016
Getting started with lean business analysis
Agile and lean thinking are starting to produce good results, not only in the world of start-ups, but also in IT environments in established organisations. But more value can be created, and more waste eliminated, by bringing lean principles to the business and to the business analysis profession. There are lots of great resources available online. In this post, I gathered some material that inspired me.
October 12, 2016
Corporate innovation: not just two kids in a garage
When you are working in a start-up with a small number of people, you can take decisions quickly, independent of existing products or services, strategies, organisational structures and so on. That’s one of the advantages of being “two kids in a garage”. In theory, you could simulate such an environment in an established organisation. In reality, it proofs difficult to keep corporate interference out of the way.
September 28, 2016
BA is not for BAs
The BA conference 2016: Transforming Ideas into Action. Far too much inspiration to wrap up in a short blog, but still, here are some of my takeaways.
Confidence
Sometimes, it only takes twenty seconds of insane courage to get what we want. The courage to simply ask for it. Want to be involved during project initiation and not just execution? Ask. Want to try a new technique or approach your stakeholders are not used to? Do it and see what happens.
May 27, 2016
Don’t improve. Rethink. Starting from the customer.
As technology keeps evolving, the opportunities for making your customers’ lifes better keep growing. Making things easier, faster, simpler, cheaper, or exceeding expectations more regularly, digitalisation makes it possible. Sounds pretty straightforward, but in reality, this proves to be rather challenging. It requires organisations to question their approach and shift from inside-out to outside-in thinking.
Let me share some examples with you.
May 18, 2016
Digital transformation, a means to an end
While spending some time in Rio for facilitating a business case training, I got to see quite a lot of surfers (mostly before work hours, mind you). At the same time, I came across a video about the Samsung Galaxy Surfboard. The video shows a surfboard with a LED display, enabling the surfer to check weather and water conditions, like the frequency of waves, and to receive text messages. It’s a nice example of how technology can be integrated in just about any aspect of our life.
This demonstrates how digital transformation is blending online and offline worlds, or analog and digital worlds, into a single human experience. It shows how technology has become a powerful enabler for improving our lives. But technology still is just that: an enabler.
April 29, 2016
Say yes to no
An important task for any BA is finding out why. Why do we need this project? Why do we need this requirement? Without understanding the why (the rationale), there is a significant risk of building the wrong solution or implementing features in an ineffective way.
Saying no to strategies, projects and requirements, is a quick and fun technique to uncover a stakeholder’s reasoning and increase your understanding of the project and proposed solution.
February 16, 2016
A BA’s approach to lean strategy execution
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 mind set carries with it an important risk: blindly building the proposed solution does not guarantee business value.
