Welcome! This site specializes in providing tips and tools for Business Analysts and systems development in general. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you’d prefer, you can also receive my posts directly to your e-mail. Thanks for visiting!Thinking of trying your hand at business analysis? Already a BA, and want to find information that will help you hone your skills? Just wondering what in the world a Business Analyst is, and what he/she does? If so, I hope you’ll find this post …

I really enjoyed Chris Woodill’s collection of “weasel words” that IT delivery folks will use to buy time, deflect responsibility, or describe a situation as much rosier than reality.
The intent isn’t to be particularly humorous, but as I read it, I couldn’t help but remember that funny “this is what she says, but THIS is what she means” e-mail poking fun at male-female communication. Now, I’ve never met Chris, but having read through this list, I’d almost swear we must have worked on the same projects with some of …

Jonathan Miles: Fingerjig Typing Game
Fingerjig is a 6 minute game that tests your typing prowess. Words are randomly chosen from a dictionary of over 70,000. You must try to type them as quickly and accurately as you can!
The average score for Fingerjig is 476,983. If you can beat this then

(tags: hu)

David’s Software Development Survival Guide: Undreamt Requirements
Interesting insight into 3 distinct types of requirements: Conscious Requirements - Problems that the new system must solve; Unconscious Requirements - Already solved by the current system; Undreamed of Requirements - Would be a …

Modern Analyst | The Community for Business & Systems Analysts
Modern Analyst is a community and resource portal for the business analyst, systems analyst, as well as other IT professionals involved in the business analysis or systems anaysis activites of software engineering.
(tags: businessanalyst)

Meeting Management Made Easy
This article presents some useful tips for sound meeting management as well as providing references for where to find more help in managing your meetings better.
(tags: meetings management)

Better Projects: Ethics in project management
Craig Brown discusses ethics in project work & encourages reflection on personal core values as well industry standard values and how they align with one’s project work.
(tags: ethics management)

Change is Bad? Mistakes are Worse | Tyner Blain
Scott Sehlhorst takes on CNET over an article implying in a roundabout way that the reason Microsoft’s new Live e-mail platform has fizzled is that change is inherently a negative thing. He argues “[t]he whole change is bad argument is a red herring. The
(tags: analysis)

The instructor of a training session I recently attended used an analogy that I liked. He asked whether we thought of McDonald’s as a high-quality restaurant. The question drew a few chuckles and, of course, most of us replied that we did not. He then went on to explain that, in fact, McDonald’s is a high-quality restaurant, and here’s why:
Quality is consistency.
McDonald’s is not high-quality because it is considered a premium product, but because it consistently satisfies customer expectations. If a customer wants a quick, tasty meal in 3 minutes …

What are leading reasons for unproductive review sessions of project deliverables? One comes quickly to mind for me - how about when 90% of your invitees show up without having even glanced at the materials in advance.
For one thing, holding a meeting in this environment is not only incredibly inefficient, but it is also unfair to those who have done their homework.
In my last post, I suggested that it is a good idea to provide meeting attendees with an agenda before the meeting so they know what to expect, …