I’m pleased to say that one of my recent blog articles has been published on “Techwell.com”, where I have contributed as a guest author. I’d love to hear what you think, so please take a look and add a comment on the site.
A short excerpt is shown below:
Excerpt:
“One challenge that business analysts face is early solutioneering. There are times when stakeholders are reluctant to discuss their needs or desires in terms of requirements, but just love to outline the specific technological solution that they want.
Perhaps they’ve seen a great new application that will solve all of their problems, or perhaps they’ve concluded that rolling out tablet PCs will increase productivity. In these situations, it’s important to help stakeholders understand the root problem and the desired end state by acting as a critical friend through enterprise analysis.
It’s worth taking a step back to consider why this scenario presents itself in the first place. As a business analyst, you’re probably comfortable with conceptual and logical thinking. You can think in multiple levels of abstraction, and you’re comfortable dealing with ambiguity and working towards a vision for the future.
You can ensure that requirements are written in a solution agnostic way—perhaps writing requirements like “authenticate user” rather than “validate password”—as even using the word “password” pre-supposes that they’ll be a password. We might use a thumbprint, key, or retina scan instead.
While in many projects defining solution-agnostic requirements is important—particularly when the solution is not yet known—it can be a challenge to gain consensus and wider understanding. Take the following hypothetical mixture of high-level requirements…”
Click on the link below to read the rest of this article
http://www.techwell.com/2013/03/how-bring-requirements-life