Declan Chellar

I was between two minds about writing this post. After all, everyone knows that change control is important, don’t they? Then I remembered a couple of interesting cases where people did not seem to know that. In one case, a junior programmer had developed a very good rapport with one of the customers, a desirable [...]

In Step 3 we continued our workflow by adding a status for each stage of the flow as well as the business rule which informed us when to route the work to an HR manager. Now we shall investigate and add any SLAs that may apply to this flow. SLAs can be documented textually or [...]

Have you heard the term “helicopter parent“? Well, I try not to be a “helicopter leader” (although I am sure I don’t always succeed). When mentoring a team of people, it can be tempting to do things for them if they aren’t getting things perfectly right, but that can distract you from your job as [...]

In Step 2 we continued our workflow by using connector shapes to show the flow between the different stages of the work. In this step we are going to add a status for each stage of the flow as well as the business rule we noticed we were going to need. Statuses: We place a [...]

I have just joined Slideshare and I received an automated welcome e-mail from “donotreply@slideshare.net”. The message said: Your SlideShare account is verified. And I’d like to personally welcome you to the World’s largest community for sharing presentations. It was “signed” by the CEO of Slideshare. Why do people write in e-mails: “I’d like to personally” [...]

I believe that when you hire a hound with a good pedigree and training, you ought to follow where it is going and not stop it so you can insist it explain why it uses one sniffing technique and not another. It seems to me that this is generally the case when someone hires a [...]

In Step 1 we started drawing our workflow based on what we knew from the high level statements of requirement in the project scope. The next step is to start connecting the dots, the dots being the functionality to be available to the users (remember I am using Use Cases in this example). As I [...]

In the world of systems development, “assumption” is kind of a dirty word, but sometimes it can be a good thing. Assumptions are only bad when they are not confirmed with the customer. However, as a business analyst, your job is to put your thinking cap on between interviews/workshops and you make assumptions in order [...]

In the foreword, I suggested a definition of “workflow” and provided some high level statements of requirement which provided the scope of our leave request workflow. I also said that four of those statements could be investigated either in the form of use cases or user stories. In my example, I have chosen to go [...]

A workflow can be described as a repeatable orchestration of activities that affect an identified piece of work (work object), across multiple roles and governed by business rules, beginning with the generation of the work object and ending with the resolution of the work object. I am quite specific in my use of language in [...]