Declan Chellar

When do you say “No” to a customer? This is a question a reader of this blog asked me in an e-mail recently. We are all familiar with the phrase “The customer is always right”, but well all know that the customer is sometimes wrong. It is likely, therefore, that at some point in your professional [...]

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 [...]

When we are involved in producing a piece of software, it’s easy to forget that we are not simply building a product: we are implementing a change in the way a company operates. Change is unnerving. We all know that. I know it particularly because I started losing my hair when I was eighteen. Changes [...]

I have been asked to write a little more about stakeholders. In an earlier post I talked about why stakeholder management is important, but before you can have a stakeholder management plan you have to understand your stakeholders and for that you need to do stakeholder analysis. You could say that stakeholder analysis is a [...]

In Part 1 we took a look at a sample As Is change control business process as presented to us by our fictional customer. The customer owns the process Our next goal is to produce a To Be model by improving on the As Is model. However, the worst thing we could do is stomp [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

Business rules are key to the efficient and flexible functioning of BPM systems, but what should the analyst do when the Business does not know what the rules are? Wait a moment! Surely the Business always knows what its own rules are. Not necessarily. Businesses often have to respond quickly to market changes and the [...]

On any project, it is important to understand who the stakeholders are, what the nature of their stake is and what effect they are likely to have on the project. And by “stakeholder“, of course, I don’t mean Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in the project, can [...]