Business value is a conversation, not a number. What It Is The business value model is a technique for making critical organizational decisions in an informed and timely manner. Teams using this tool identify the most critical decisions they face, determine when they need to make those decisions, and figure out which information they need [...]
It’s not quite a 2×2, but it’s still very helpful. What It Is The constraints matrix is a quick way to show the relative importance of a set of constraints facing a project team. Each row represents a general constraint faced by most teams. The most common set to use are: Cost, Time, and Scope [...]
What it is The Purpose Based Alignment Model, created by Niel Nickolaisen, is a method for aligning business decisions and process and feature designs around purpose. The purpose of some decisions and designs is to differentiate the organization in the market; the purpose of most other decisions is to achieve and maintain parity with the [...]
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 Friendship [...]
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 [...]
In honor of Veterans Day, I thought I would post the transcript of tape recorded by my great uncle Cecil “Max” Cox about his experiences in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Sometime in the fall of 1939, we able-bodied men were asked to sign up for what was called the Selective Service. I [...]
I am excited to spend the day at Thinc Iowa presented by Silicon Prairie News. The event is positioned as "the common ground between corporations and startups." From the minute I first heard about the event this summer, I knew it was something right down my alley. I have always had an interest in entrepreneurship [...]
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. [...]
