Karl Wiegers shares his lessons on requirements, project management, design, quality and more. Karl’s advice can make you significantly better at what you do. Show Notes Karl Wiegers started programming in 1970 and has collected 60 lessons he has learned in several areas of software development including requirements, design, project management, culture, teamwork, quality, and process improvement. Each of these lessons bring insights that can help you to and your organization to become significa...
Nov 30, 2021•26 min•Ep. 228
Ian Reynolds discusses how to discover the right solutions for your customers and then deliver them quickly. Show Notes Many organizations, especially as people are trying to work in more Lean and Agile ways, work towards producing a minimum viable product (MVP) and move on after achieving it. These organizations aren’t thinking about the value that could be delivered after the MVP. They believe that if they put a minimum viable products in our customer’s hands, they know whether or not it’s a g...
Nov 16, 2021•22 min•Ep. 227
In this lightning cast, we explore the 5-step design process Elon Musk uses for SpaceX to innovate and get better results. Show Notes In a recent interview, Elon Musk shared the 5-step design process he uses at Space X to achieve better results. Below are the details of this design process. Step 1: Make your requirements less dumb. Make sure you start with high quality requirements and that you truly understand the ‘why’ behind each. Simply using requirements because someone told you that’s what...
Oct 26, 2021•4 min
In this episode, we revisit Theory of Constraints, an approach to improving organizational performance by accelerating delivery. Author Clarke Ching shares his FOCCCUS Formula to address the system’s bottleneck. Show Notes In every process or value delivery system, there’s one constraint (bottleneck) that limits the flow of value of the entire system. If you want to deliver faster, you must identify and address the bottleneck. To improve the flow of value, we can apply the Theory of Constraints,...
Oct 05, 2021•12 min•Ep. 226
David Mantica helps us understand business models and helps us understand how to find new opportunities to create greater value. Show Notes Creating product requirements and delivering features is one thing. Understanding the business context and business models associated with your product and identifying different avenues to drive value is quite another. Understanding your business model can help drive value for your organization and increase the value that you contribute as a Business Analyst...
Sep 07, 2021•25 min•Ep. 225
In this episode, Clarke Ching shares an innovative problem solving approach to help us solve tricky problems. Show Notes We’re often called upon to apply our problem solving skills and help organizations make better decisions. The challenge is when we face really tricky problems. To solve these, we need an innovating problem solving approach. Corkscrew thinking is about how to come up with clever ideas when you’re facing what seems like an impossible situation. This approach helps you to be crea...
Aug 27, 2021•22 min•Ep. 224
David Mantica discusses the brain science behind some of the challenges knowledge workers face and helps you shift your mindset to enable you to thrive in a complex and chaotic environment. Show Notes As knowledge workers, we rely on our brains and relationships to get things done. That’s where some of the challenges lie. The hard skills of business analysis, project management, and product ownership are relatively easy to learn. But the soft skills . . . that’s the real challenge. It’s amazing ...
Jul 28, 2021•28 min•Ep. 223
David Bland discusses the importance of testing your business ideas and shares ways to dramatically reduce the risk and increase the likelihood of success for your product, initiative, or project. Show Notes Studies show that 7 out of 10 products fail to deliver on expectations. We often fall into the trap of moving forward with a project, product, or business idea without first validating it. This results in wasted time and money from solutions that don’t have a good market fit or aren’t solvin...
Jun 15, 2021•26 min•Ep. 222
Adrian Reed discusses systems thinking, how it enables business agility, and how it can help elevate the value you bring to your organization. Show Notes We live in a complex, rapidly changing world. In order to support our stakeholders and our organizations, we need to expand our view and adopt a systems thinking mindset. This allows you to see the whole and the interconnectedness between the parts, which in turn allows you to help stakeholders make the right decisions. Systems thinking makes b...
May 25, 2021•26 min•Ep. 221
Author and thought leader Karl Wiegers shares principles and lessons he has learned from poor designs and what you can do to develop solutions that create a great user experience. Show Notes We’re all experienced products that are confusing, difficult to use, and cause frustration. Author Karl Wiegers has pulled together a collection of products with a thoughtless design and created a set of design principles and lessons to help us create solutions with the user in mind. If the solutions that we...
May 18, 2021•32 min•Ep. 220
Kent McDonald shares his thoughts on what it takes to succeed as a Business Analyst in an Agile environment. Show Notes To be successful as a Business Analyst in an Agile environment, you need to apply your same traditional skills and techniques differently. Kent McDonald characterizes an Agile Business Analyst as those who take on the perspective of product people having the five characteristics below. Understand your context and use that information to determine what kind of techniques to use ...
Mar 23, 2021•25 min•Ep. 219
In this episode of the BA Toolbox, we explore the A3 report and it’s use in problem solving. Show Notes What’s an A3 report? An A3 report has several uses including business proposals and process improvements. However, it’s most commonly used for problem solving. If you have a tricky problem in your organization of with your project, perhaps an A3 report can help. The name A3 refers to the European paper size, which is similar to 11 by 17 inch tabloid paper in the United States. It’s big enough ...
Mar 09, 2021•4 min
Melissa Boggs discusses how the Scrum Alliance transformed into customer-centric teams and how you can have a greater customer focus. SHOW NOTES Over the past several years, many organizations have transformed the way they work and the way they’re organized. With Digital and Agile transformations and shifting from projects to products, organizations are trying to find better ways of working and deliver more customer value. Some forward-thinking organizations have even transformed to organize aro...
Mar 02, 2021•27 min•Ep. 218
Understanding the different levels of Agile planning and what they mean for you will help your team stay aligned and focused on achieving the right outcomes. Show Notes Responding to change over following a plan. This value listed in the Agile Manifesto doesn’t mean that we don’t do planning in Agile. In fact, we plan more in Agile than in traditional methods; we just do it differently. A common metaphor for planning in Agile is an onion. Each layer of the onion reflects another level of plannin...
Feb 09, 2021•6 min
Paul Niven helps us to understand Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a goal-setting tool to set ambitious goals with measurable results. Show Notes Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal-setting system to help drive strategic execution. It’s a critical thinking framework and ongoing discipline to focus efforts to drive the company forward. In short, OKRs help your organization align and achieve important goals. OKRs go beyond simple goal setting in that there is a build-in approach for refl...
Feb 04, 2021•23 min•Ep. 217
Stop the wasted time and money from ineffective meetings by giving your next meeting a POWER Start. Show Notes According to a recent Atlassian survey, professionals waste 31 hours each month on unproductive meetings. That’s about four full days wasted each month. In the U.S. alone, unnecessary meetings cost businesses 37 billion dollars in just in salaries. You can help stop this madness by giving your meetings some POWER. We’ve likely all received (or sent) meeting invitations with little more ...
Jan 26, 2021•6 min
David Hawks shares an approach to transformations, projects, and large change initiatives by starting with the intended business outcomes. Show Notes Many transformations and large initiatives fail or don’t achieve their intended value. While the transformation, project, or large initiative may be “done”, if it doesn’t result in its intended business value, it has failed. Part of the reason for this is a lack of alignment. We often see transformations and large initiatives where the transformati...
Jan 20, 2021•23 min•Ep. 216
Are you working on a change initiative? Overcome resistance to change using Goldratt’s Four Quadrants of Change. A lot of people talk about how difficult change is and how people resist change. People don’t actually resist change; they respond to a change by evaluating the change across four dimensions. These four dimensions make up Goldratt’s Four Quadrant’s on Change. The reason getting someone to change is hard or we perceive that people are resisting change is because we often only look at o...
Jan 12, 2021•5 min
Roman Pichler discusses the challenges associated with leading in a Product Management role and what you can do to overcome those challenges. Listen to the full episode to discover the challenges associated with leading as a Product Manager and what you can do to overcome those challenges. Your Homework Consider slowing things down once in a while and make time to step away from your day-to-day work. Use that time to check-in with yourself and reflect on how your week is going and the challenges...
Jan 06, 2021•31 min•Ep. 215
Laura Brandenburg shares her framework for career development; the Business Analyst Success Path. Show Notes Many Business Analysts struggle to understand how to get to the next step in their career. The way to advance in your career depends on where you are now. Charting your career path includes defining the “as is” and “to be” of your career. Laura’s Business Analyst Success Path framework highlights six stages. Explorer – This is when you’re first exploring the Business Analysis profession...
Sep 09, 2020•27 min•Ep. 214
If you want to accelerate and deliver with greater speed and flexibility that’s critical to serving your customers, combine Agile with Theory of Constraints. Clarke Ching shows us how. Show Notes Perhaps you have Agile teams that are doing everything right; they’re limiting work in progress, communicating well, and delivering with quality. But maybe you want to accelerate and deliver with greater speed and flexibility that’s critical to serving your customers. Theory of Constraints is an approac...
Jul 28, 2020•28 min•Ep. 213
Joshua Kerievsky shares the four principles of Modern Agile and how they can help you find better ways of working and achieve better business outcomes. Show Notes Agile is about finding better ways of working. To continuously improve and achieve the right outcomes for your organization and your customers, we need understand foundational concepts that allow teams to make great products. Modern Agile methods are comprised of four guiding principles that can help you uncover better ways of working ...
Jul 07, 2020•33 min•Ep. 212
In this time of unrelenting change, we need leadership at all levels. Here’s what you need to help your team succeed. HOW NOTES We live in a time of unrelenting change. To enable teams and organizations to deal with this new reality, we need a different approach to leadership at all levels. Adaptive Leadership is a practice developed by a Harvard Psychiatrist that allows us to better adapt to change. This is even more important as more and more organizations embrace Agile ways of working. When p...
May 19, 2020•27 min•Ep. 207
Communication is vital to success on teams and in organizations. In this episode, Tommy Re shows us how to dramatically improve communication. Show Notes One of the issues holding organizations back is the development of their leaders. A lot of what it takes to develop as leaders are the communication skills necessary for them to work effectively with other people. According to one survey, 86% of employees cited poor communication as a leading cause of workplace failures. Poor communication is a...
Apr 14, 2020•20 min•Ep. 210
Grant Wright Shares simple Visual Thinking tools and practices to help your team get aligned and retain information. Show Notes Do you want to increase retention of information, ensure alignment and a shared understanding, and increase creativity? Visual Thinking can help get everyone on the same page, increase the team’s ability to solve problems, and help everyone remember what was discussed. Listen to the full episode to understand the tools and techniques of Visual Thinking and how they can ...
Mar 31, 2020•31 min•Ep. 209
Author Michael Levine helps us unleash the power of large, diverse teams of smart, experienced individuals to deliver positive business results. Show Notes How can you unleash the power of large, diverse groups of smart, experienced individuals to deliver positive business results through software development? Large-scale software development is a complex endeavor, especially in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. While groups of people have come together in the past to ac...
Mar 19, 2020•24 min•Ep. 208
Paul Pelletier helps us to understand the root causes of disrespectful behaviors at work and how to address them. Show Notes Have you ever witnessed toxic behaviors that bring down a team or lead to project failures? Bad behaviors can come in a variety of forms; from rolling your eyes when someone is talking to outright bullying. These disrespectful behaviors disrupt meetings, lead to a lack of collaboration, and cost organizations millions of dollars each year in failed projects and employee tu...
Mar 04, 2020•28 min•Ep. 207
Jim Rushton helps us to understand why 80% of analytics projects fail and what you can do to make sure yours succeeds. Show Notes Many organizations are implementing analytics programs. Unfortunately, four out of five analytics projects fail. Listen to the full episode to understand why analytics projects fail and what you can do to ensure success on your next analytics initiative. Make your analytics projects successful YOUR HOMEWORK Start with developing a lexicon and defining terms so that ev...
Feb 21, 2020•24 min•Ep. 206
Building on last year’s episode about BA performance goals, we discuss how to choose the right goals and achieve them. Business Analyst Goals Revisited The post Lightning Cast: BA Goals Revisited appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis .
Feb 12, 2020•6 min
Lori Silverman helps us get real value from data by developing core competence and creating the culture needed to support collaborative data-informed decision making. Show Notes Many organizations are trying to use data for better decision making. Unfortunately, most aren’t getting the value they expected. Recent research suggests that people and process are impediments to seeing value from data efforts. To get to collaborative informed decision making and getting real business value from data, ...
Feb 05, 2020•26 min
