What makes a business analyst stand out from the herd?

This is the fourth part of a six-part series on business analysts – why we need them and what makes a great one great.

Quality #3: Great BA's ask great questions, and know how to sniff out answers.
Precision questioning (drilling down into a topic, and asking questions in a one-question, one-answer format, without ruffling feathers), is something great BA's do (whether they realize they do it or not). They also know how to find the answers to questions and don't wait for the answers to come to them, and can diplomatically and quickly navigate even the most complex paths through the organization. They don't get stuck for long.

What Makes a Business Analyst Stand Out From the Herd?

This is the third part of a six-part series on business analysts - why we need them and what makes a great one great.
Quality #2: Great BA's are great with people.

Establishing trust, both with the business team and the technical team, is critical to the success of a BA and it comes down to communication. A BA needs to be able to drive diplomacy, guide conversations, ask great questions, and funnel accurate information in such a way that multiple different personality types can understand it. Trust, once it is established, can be seen when a BA becomes the "go-to" guy or gal for both the business stakeholders and the developers. Once a BA is viewed as the universal problem solver, that's when you know that trust is strong.

A BA's job is tricky. They need to convince people to commit their time and effort to a project that is often not their top priority. It is rare that a BA has enough availability from stakeholders to elicit perfect requirements, follow a perfect schedule, or gather information in order. Average, even good BA's learn to cajole, coerce, and otherwise convince stakeholders to accommodate them – but great BA's make stakeholders want to participate.

What makes a business analyst stand out from the herd?

This is the second part of a six-part series on business analysts - why we need them and what makes a great one great. 

Quality 1:  A great BA focuses on business value and solving real business problems. 
Effective BA’s focus on business value before solutions, and always ask questions about the value of their work and the work of their teammates.  They understand that activities (even difficult ones) that don’t relate to the strategic goals of the organization have little value.  Great BA’s understand why what they’re doing has value and can articulate that value to any coworker or stakeholder on demand. In addition, they are always looking for ways to uncover more value for the organization by thinking the strategic goals of the business.   Whether that means merging two projects that overlap, or simplifying processes to cut development time, great BA’s are the voice of the goals of the company to functional groups across the organization. 

Because BA’s rarely have the authority to take unilateral action, the way they voice these needs and goals is critical.   Great BA’s are willing to develop compelling arguments for superiors to take action.  They are brave – being vocal may place them at a slightly higher level of risk (since they may be going against popular opinion), but they do this for the improvement of the company.

Wondering if you even NEED a Business Analyst?

You do. Here is why.

Adding a missed requirement or feature in the business analysis stage will cost you one person's time.

Adding a missed requirement or feature during the development stage will cost you the development team's time, a project manager's time, and "retrofitting" costs.

Adding a missed requirement or feature during the testing phase will cost you the development team's time, a project manager's time, the test team's time, and the time of some users.

Adding a missed requirement or feature in the field will cost you the development team's time, a project manager's time, the test team's time, the marketing team's time, the sales team's time, and the time of some (now very annoyed) customers. Statistics show that making changes and additions this late is 18-22 times more expensive than figuring out the issue early with the help of a good BA.

That's why you need a BA. But what makes a BA a standout in the herd? The next series of posts will focus on specific qualities you should look for.

What Makes a Great Tester Great?

Imagine a tester so awesome that his developers banded together to take him to lunch each day for months so he would stop logging bugs for a while. (That's a true story from Microsoft). That got us thinking – what qualities take a tester from good, to great?

They understand the user, and the business. Great testers can visualize the impact of the bugs they find on customers. They feel users' pain, and read what they say on forums and blogs –brave testers may even spend some time working with their help desk to get some perspective. This is also critical for prioritizing testing. The best testers know that they will only be able to run a fraction of the test cases they come up with, and they scope their testing so that the bugs most likely to affect the user are executed first. And the best of the best? They use all of that intel to anticipate the future needs of the user.

Passion for what they do. Good testers are genuinely excited about bugs, but not because they take pleasure out of finding mistakes and rubbing a developer's nose in it. Great testers understand the cost and impact of the bug on the bottom line and on people's perceptions – and they understand how expensive it is (in every sense of the word) not to fix it.

They understand the user. Great testers can visualize the impact of the bugs they find on customers. They feel users' pain, and read what they say on forums and blogs –brave testers may even spend some time working with their help desk to get some perspective. This is also critical for prioritizing testing. The best testers know that they will only be able to run a fraction of the test cases they come up with, and they scope their testing so that the bugs most likely to affect the user are executed first. Anticipate future needs and really understand the business

They have people skills. Testers can take a lot of abuse from programmers – so being great requires a thick skin, a sense of diplomacy, and a sense of humor. The best of the best won't allow themselves to be kept in a silo, either. You'll find them engaging with all parts of the business, curiously asking questions and working to really "get" the big picture.

Great testers are an extremely rare breed. They are also absolutely critical to shipping quality software. If you're looking for software testing services, or wish you had a tester like this, we can help. Contact us at info@ideaentity.com.

What Makes a Great Developer Great?

From tiny startups to huge financial giants, companies are all increasingly reliant on the engineers that make great software happen. These engineers are often called ninjas or rock stars. But there are several things that separate them from the pack.

They don't eat elephants. Great engineers take small, manageable bites out of the problem at hand, and tend to value short releases, simple requirements and usable features. When this bite-by-bite approach is applied iteratively, rich and robust software will arise naturally.
They recycle. There is a strange drive in the software industry to ignore and redo what is already there. Ninjas leverage existing infrastructure, whether it is code, third party libraries, or web services – all in an effort to make their job easier.
They embrace their inner 3-year-old. Great engineers ask why… a lot. They are innately curious about the context their software is going to plug into, which allows them to understand the impact and actual value of what they are building.
They speak human. No matter how badly they might want to, great engineers don't lock themselves in the basement with a case of Mountain Dew. They play nicely on teams, speak up in meetings, send good email, and create rock-solid documentation.

Whether you need help finding a great engineer, or need to borrow our team of ninjas for a while, we can help. Contact us at info@ideaentity.com.

What Makes a Great Project Manager Great

There's no doubt that having an understanding of project management methodologies, from Agile to Waterfall, is important to the development of any project manager. But these methodologies are not what make a project manager (PM) great. If you think back to the stellar PM's you've met, most likely they had some beguiling combination of problem solving skills, organization, confidence, and an unwavering can-do attitude. They may even have a host of credentials. But being a great PM often has less to do with your resume and more to do with your ability to be a coach.

Great PM's know that the optimism and morale of your team is crucial. When problems arise, it's you as the leader who cannot waver in your positivity. You also need to understand each team member's strengths in order to align duties with resources that best ensure success. Know who your star quarterback is. Know who your linemen are. Know who your waterboy is. Give each team member a voice. And always, always back up your team to the client.

Great PM's are a champion for the business. Technical team members tend to be wrapped up in day-to-day technical minutia, but lack contextual business understanding. Great PM's constantly ensure that their team members know why they are doing what they are doing.

Great PM's aren't fancy. Overly complex tactical status reports with obsessively color coded cells very rarely will help your team really shine to the client. Great PM's are direct communicators, active listeners, and can break down the scariest problems into simple, manageable chunks for their team. And they do it calmly.

If you're looking for business-focused project management services infused with just the right amount of process, and you don't know where to start, we can help. You can contact Idea Entity's team of "coaches" at info@ideaentity.com.

Taking SharePoint Further

According to the 433-page Intranet Design Annual 2011* from Nielson Norman Group, featuring what they consider to be this year's ten best intranets, half of last year's winners use SharePoint as a foundation. Yet in the consulting world, you'll hear a lot of, "I want to use SharePoint, but I don't want it to look like SharePoint." With enough time, money, and effort, you can make SharePoint look utterly chic. Yet organizations need to think about harnessing SharePoint's power and customizing it in smart ways, not just pretty ones.

Keep it Real: SharePoint workflows should custom-tied to the actual, day-to-day activities of worker bees. That will enable an instant enterprise productivity boost.

BI, not BS: Custom scorecards and mash-ups within SharePoint can provide quick, powerful, and really useful business intelligence to end users.

Right-time vs. Real-time: A correctly-leveraged SharePoint site is all about delivering the right information to the right people in the right format at the right time, particularly for the people in charge. This will drive quick, data-driven decision-making.

The key to all of this is finding a SharePoint partner who will focus on making the changes that will really matter to your business. Don't know where to start? Idea Entity can do all of the above – and the jewel in our SharePoint crown is our ability to leverage SharePoint to consolidate enterprise line-of-business applications to save you a whole lot of money.

*http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/

When was the last time you curled up with a cup of cocoa and a great user manual?

Great enterprise software product documentation provides perfectly relevant content to all potential users, whether it's in the form of a high-level architecture diagram, a step-by-step walkthrough, or complex API documentation. However, no single format works for all users, and creating thorough documentation for different user bases requires time and great writers. Unfortunately, for those people launching enterprise products in a climate of accelerated timelines, market pressure, and tight resources, this is impossible.

So what should you do? It may be tempting to take the "quick and dirty" route, and hastily document as you shove the product out the door – or adopt a "ship first, document later" philosophy. But there are a few innovative ways you can extract the most bang from your documentation buck without sacrificing the speed necessary to compete in today's market.

Let the product be your guide: By allowing product prioritization to drive your documentation effort, you maximize the value of what does get written. Tackle the highest-priority features/systems first, to ensure that core functionality is well-supported. You can get to the nuances of lower-priority functionalities later.

Where does the buck stop? Use revenue-based risk management to ensure that those functionalities that pose the most significant risk to revenue are addressed first.

Make Your User Happy: Especially with a v1 product, your documentation is your first opportunity to engage with your user. Good documentation can actually enhance your product offering. So for the most immediate feature sets, the documentation has to be grounded in the most immediate user expectations. This will require you to think about things like system dependencies or the most probable integration headaches.

If resources are tight in-house, you may want to look for a documentation partner that really "gets" both the speed at which market penetration needs to happen, and the role good documentation plays in product reception. At Idea Entity, we understand those better than most.