Declan Chellar

Why do some customers put a proof of concept into production? In part, I suspect it has to do with wanting to spend as little as possible and still end up with something that earns them revenue. But I think it is mostly because customers fail to grasp what proof of concept really means. It [...]

I am a great believer in facing up to reality, regardless of the pain involved. I don’t know whether it is my experience as a senior business analyst or my character or both that causes me to step in from time to time and say: “Stop! Time for a reality check!” How many times has [...]

Hands up anyone who has been invited to a meeting, spent an hour or more listening to someone drone on (or worse, sat through Death by Powerpoint), only to wonder why you had been invited in the first place. Oh, look! All of you. MS Outlook allows you to indicate whether each attendee is required [...]

As a business analyst, my job is largely to help a business define and document its needs, usually so that those needs can be satisfied by technology. However, if we assume that technology is always the answer, we might find ourselves overlooking other solutions that might satisfy the business needs more quickly and more cheaply, [...]

You may have noticed the emphasis I place on visual modelling, which is fancy for “drawing pictures”. People can relate to pictures better than text in many contexts. Can you imagine an architect trying to document his building design textually? Unlike architectural drawings for a building, business analysis models are not literal. As such they [...]

When you join a project as a business analyst, I think it’s useful to note the extent to which people in the customer’s organisation copy others unnecessarily on e-mails. I am sure many of you, if not most, have been on projects where everyone gets copied on everything. What does that suggest? To me, it [...]

I don’t own a car at the moment, mainly because I don’t need one. Combine my lack of need with a lack of interest in cars as accessories and you have someone who uses public transport a lot. Of course, it’s easy for those who live in or around Madrid because public transport here is [...]

In Part 5, we documented the high level system requirements of our customer’s change control process. Now we use the HLSRs and To Be process model to build our workflow model. If you have not already read the series of posts on drawing workflows, then I suggest you do so before continuing. Click here to [...]

Once again I have heard from a colleague from the development discipline that a requirements analyst is proving to be an obstacle to success because once the customer signs off on the requirements specification, the analyst considers his work to be done and disappears over the horizon. If I had any hair, I’d pull it [...]

Many requirements analysis specialists have little or no development or testing experience and this can lead them to forget what the real deliverable is. The purpose of requirements analysis is to provide a robust and unambiguous requirement so that architects and developers know what to build and testers know what to test. However, spending too [...]