Declan Chellar

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 [...]

Which of the following two profiles do you think matches what a leader should be and which matches what leaders generally are in reality? Profile A Profile B Is likely to be male. Has a “Can do” attitude, to the extent that he never challenges the status quo. Makes promises based on aspirations and expects [...]

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 [...]

A former colleague posted that question in Facebook today. My response was: Because many people care more about leaving their stamp than about achieving the strategic goal. “I succeeded even though we failed” sounds better to such people than “We succeeded”. This is also true on integration projects where there are multiple suppliers. When we [...]

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, [...]

This will catch a lot of people by surprise in the business world, particularly the world in which I move, where cognitive skill (watch out for that phrase in the video) is key.

A Tale Of Two Projects View more OpenOffice presentations from DeclanChellar.

Further to yesterday’s post about data loss, it turns out (according to the Mail Online) that the data was stored not on CDs which went missing, but on hard drives which were stolen from a cupboard in a supposedly secure area. A logging system would not have prevented that, of course, but adherence to a [...]

I have just read on the BBC news website that another UK state body has lost media containing sensitive data. In this case it is the Royal Air Force. I don’t understand this. In all the cases of data loss in the public sector that have hit the news in recent years, not one (to [...]

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 [...]