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Blog
Business Analysts’ Attention to Detail
Posted by Rich Crowley on Apr 8, 2009 in Project Management, Requirements | 0 comments
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, the analyst also needs to be able to aggregate...
read moreSavannah
Posted by Rich Crowley on Apr 6, 2009 in Design, Travel | 0 comments
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 a nice touch and the old oaks and spanish moss...
read moreTheory of Constraints
Posted by Rich Crowley on Mar 25, 2009 in productivity, Project Management | 0 comments
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 optimizing all subsystems in a system is not the best way...
read moreThinking Strategically as a PM
Posted by Rich Crowley on Jan 2, 2009 in Project Management, strategy | 0 comments
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 wanted to understand what systems limitations to...
read moreEarly Planning Pain
Posted by Rich Crowley on Dec 29, 2008 in Project Management | 0 comments
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 beyond those in the near term but you often need to...
read moreThe iPhone as the Modern Day Mustang
Posted by Rich Crowley on Dec 24, 2008 in Cars, Cool, Design | 0 comments
My first car was a 68 Mustang. The car was almost twenty years old when I bought it. It had black interior and although it was an automatic, it had a 289 V8 and would really go. I was just out of school, had just gotten my first apartment and I was King. While my buddies were buying new cars, getting company cars or living in big cities and using transit, my car was more than transportation. It was the epitome of cool, even with two decades behind it. I can remember the snarl it made when you started it up. Its proportions were gorgeous. Long...
read moreBusiness Requirements vs. User Requirements
Posted by Rich Crowley on Nov 26, 2008 in Requirements | 0 comments
High level business requirements are usually pretty simple in a small project. Minor enhancements or changes to an existing product or service would fall into this category. Examples would be a wording change change in client correspondence or changing a commission calculation formula for a sales force contract. These business requirements often get documented in a project charter and in the business requirements with the same level of detail because from the perspective of the business sponsor and the business analyst, the change is pretty...
read moreSo many requirements, so little understanding
Posted by Rich Crowley on Nov 15, 2008 in IT, Requirements | 0 comments
Business requirements, high level requirements, user requirements, functional requirements, user interface requirements, detailed requirements, system requirements, non-functional requirements, interface requirements, software requirements, business process requirements. The good news to be taken from the list above is that there is no shortage of ways to think about requirements. The bad news is that a list of this size implies many different definitions of requirements which must be at least partly contributing to poorly defined...
read moreRequirements – I Got Nuthin!
Posted by Rich Crowley on Nov 6, 2008 in IT, Requirements | 0 comments
After 20+ years in the IT business working on projects, I’ve decided I really don’t understand nearly enough about requirements and am going to make the harsh judgement that most IT staff who are either creators or consumers of requirements, as well as business people from whom requirements are supposed to originate, don’t know much about them either. So…I’m takin’ to readin’ to see if I can learn some of the discipline around requirements in a very orderly way. One of the more intriguing insights I’ve gained so far is...
read moreOpportunity Everywhere in IT
Posted by Rich Crowley on Feb 20, 2008 in IT | 0 comments
Canada isn’t producing enough computer science graduates. So says most of the popular press and IT media I’ve been reading lately. Enrollments in post-secondary computing programs, at both college and university levels are down, both in Canada and the United States. The exception appears to be the University of Waterloo – good for it! I don’t want to debate why this is the case but from my perspective, within my client base, there is a ton of opportunity for solid IT people. The pace of technical change is very...
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