if you can’t write quickly, you are already in trouble……
When interviewing, it is important to know who you are interviewing. This is critical and as I discussed in a previous blog on social networking analysis, often we can become unstuck when we work into an interview without doing some background only to find that the this person was the key influencer and you find that you didn’t make teh most of teh session as you didn’t know “who was who in the zoo”.I recently spoke at BAWorld in Sydney and Melbourne on Communication and Connectedness in our Networked World. I stressed that it is important to know who you are interviewing, not just by their formal position on the organisational chart, but also by style, personality and group role on the project. This helps you identify who are the influencers, gatekeepers, blockers and supporters.
Ultimately one of the keys to successful requirements gathering and interviewing, is to know your audience.
I have been doing agile software development projects for awhile now, so i asked a business analysis colleague, Mark Foley to come and talk to the User group meeting I organize bimonthly for the ABAA in Canberra.
The role of the BA in an agile environment is a hot topic at the moment so we had over 30 Business Analyst attend the User Group Meeting on the 23rd of October. Mark Foley is a principal consultant from Borland, and he shared his insights into the emergence of agile as a methodology over the last ten years from the Chrysler motor car 3Cs beginnings of XP to today’s scrum sprints. Mark’s presentation is below as he kindly has allowed me to put it up on the ABAA site and slideshare.
Everyone it seems wants to be agile but it is not a magic formula and not suited to all projects.
We discussed the key elements of agile and how this can help our projects be more flexible, adaptive as through sprints we can develop and evolve the requirements with the business and users. Mark discussed that agile can be used across large geographically dispersed teams and in the government setting, agile is still relevant as documentation of the sprints as used in scrum, can help stakeholder understand the system and be more involved as the customer representative.
The ABAAwebsite has been refreshed so please check it out. There is a forum section and all the User group meetings and events will be posted to the site
Thanks to Andrew our hardworking ABAA secretary for all his efforts in putting this together.
Recent Comments