Practical ideas for managing business systems
One of my guiding principles is Reflect and Adapt, which is another way of saying learn from your experiences. Those experiences can be good or bad, and they could be based on things you did or things that you weren’t even involved in. As a result of the experience I relate below, I learned a …
A key aspect of real options is knowing when to make a decision. If you are facing the need to decide, determine when you have to make the decision and use the intervening time to gather as much information as possible. That way, when you An excellent example of decision timing is the flight of …
After an inexcusably long delay, here is another post on one of the sessions from Agile 2011. This one, Agile Thinking for Business Analysis: Going Beyond User Stories was presented by Steve Adolph & Shane Hastie. The premise of the session was that although User Stories are the “industry standard” way of documenting requirements in …
Steve Denning, a former world bank executive and author gave two presentations at Agile 2011, both of which were of extreme relevance and importance for business analysis practitioners. I was able to attend both and found in this case at least, we were able to schedule across stages in the right order. His Making the …
There are two ways to look at the topic of Portfolio Management: How do you incorporate projects using an agile approach into your broader overall portfolio How do you manage your portfolio in an agile manner? Kenny Rubin in his presentation Strategies for Portfolio Management explored the second, which implicitly covered some of the first. …
The first session I attended was Jez Humble’s Applying the Lean Startup Model to the Enterprise. This session introduced the Lean Startup Model and discussed how the concepts could be applied to larger more established organizations, specifically how to organize development and operations. About the talk If you are not familiar with lean startup, don’t …
The first keynote at the Agile 2011 Conference was Barbara Frederickson, a professor at UNC Chapel Hill, who has done a great deal of work on the impact of positive emotions. In her talk Why Care about Positive Emotions, she discussed how positive emotions can change people's physiology and impact their effectiveness at work, in …
On June 15th, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of business analysts who had a lot of questions about agile. I had been asked to give a 45 minute overview of agile and was provided a sample list of questions for the presentation would cover. I quickly realized that I would never come close …
Question: Have you seen vendor driven agile working well in traditional waterfall companies? I have to date not seen a situation where a vendor was using an agile approach, and the customer was a traditional waterfall company. I’m not saying that it does not happen, just that I have not seen it. I think the …
The role of Scrum Master is specific to Scrum. Since Scrum has become the most widely known of the agile approaches, the term Scrum Master has become a common term for the person who is acting as process guardian and facilitator for agile teams. Question: How do you feel about the BA being the daily …
Question: How do offshore resources fit into agile? Agile is heavily reliant on team communication and collaboration. The most effective means of communication is face to face, at a white board because you have the most means of transmitting information – the words, the nonverbals, and tone of voice. An ideal situation is for all …
Question: What is agile? There are as many different definitions of agile as there are practitioners. Not to be outdone, here is mine: Agile is collaboration among stakeholders to deliver value to customers in frequent increments with consistent reflection and adaptation. Question: In your experience, what are the core trends of agile? That is, what …
Question: What value does the BA provide within a true agile project? There’s actually two interesting points to discuss in this question. First, the question regarding the value provided by a business analyst, and the second, the label “true agile project”. I’ll address each point separately. The value provided by a business analyst on an …
Question: What has been the business side’s response to it [agile]? Generally the response has been initial skepticism and reluctance, followed by acceptance and finally enthusiasm in those cases where they are involved properly. The initial skepticism and reluctance spring from the increased frequency of their time commitment, and the smaller amount of documentation available …
Question: How do you learn about the agile approach? How does a BA learn to manage the agile approach? Find a good coach. Become part of a team that has done it before, or is doing it. Do it. Sometimes the simplest answers are the best.
