Business Analysts’ Attention to Detail
An old song says that a poker player needs to “know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em”. A similar maxim for a business analyst might be that you’ve got to “know when to drill down and know when to abstract to a higher level”. Not as poetic or lyrical but true nonetheless. A good business analyst is able to balance between the need for drilling down deeper when they perceive their customer is providing input to business requirements at too high a level and conversely,...
Read MoreSavannah
My family and I took a trip to Tybee Island, Georgia recently. What a great week. We enjoyed the beach given the warm spring weather we had, a little golf, a little biking, great food and of course, site-seeing in Savannah. While not old by the standards set by cities elsewhere in the world, Savannah is old when compared with other cities in North America. Founded in 1733, its core is really a neat example of a planned city. The city squares that are basically public parks every few blocks are...
Read MoreTheory of Constraints
I’m doing some reading on the “Theory of Constraints” (TOC) as it applies to project and portfolio management. In a nutshell, the jist of this theory is that every system is constrained by some bottleneck somewhere in the system. In a project, we often consider this to be the critical path. Too often, we PM’s apply rigour everywhere in our PMBOK-centric approach to managing our projects in an optimal way. TOC stands this approach on its head and suggests that...
Read MoreThinking Strategically as a PM
I once managed a project that involved launching a new product for a financial services company. The initial few weeks of the project were very chaotic. Product development had not fully defined the specs of the product they wanted to launch which prevented the administration area from fully understanding what it would take to do their jobs once the product was launched. IT needed requirements from both sides before it could provide a meaningful contribution but the product development folks...
Read MoreEarly Planning Pain
One of the big struggles in the life of a PM is meeting the demand for a full project plan prior early in the project. Business management needs the ability to plan and so their request is not unreasonable. However, it is often very difficult to come up with a plan that has detailed task breakdowns, resourcing, estimates and so forth for tasks in the project that are beyond the initial phases / iterations with any level of confidence. You can put a high level plan in place for those tasks...
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