Marie Halsey - What's in Your BA Toolkit 2013 with Notes

I wanted to speak on this topic because over the years, at BA World and at other BA events, I have found the struggle to find the right BA toolkit is widespread in the BA community.

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Loved tools since CASE and data modeling tools; SHL built a custom RM tool; client asked us to convert to RequisitePro. Love-hate relationship – ReqPro more sophisticated than custom, but it was still a lot of work. Then, …

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Post mortem feedback from lead designer - “BA’s are dinosaurs ... get out of the dark ages and stop using Word”. We were using Office tools: Word for use cases and text-based documentation, Excel for Data Dictionary, Visio for diagrams, using ReqPro for RM. We were not meeting needs of all stakeholders.

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As the liaison between many stakeholders, BAs need to be masters of communication and communication techniques.

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Software-based tools support many forms of communication. This is where BAs experience the most tool challenges.

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Not so good for: product branching, overlapping releases; baselining subs-sets of reqts; duplicate content in different documents.

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Traceability in Excel is hard and time-consuming to maintain

These are the problems that will be solved with the right tools in the toolbox.

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WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get!

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Developers – ALM solutions

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Directional – ‘Trace to’: Business Reqt Stakeholder Reqt.

Peer-to-peer: Use Case – Business Rule.

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Cross-project – business rules in one project, each subsystem in separate project.

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Produce different artifacts with different methodologies and project types. Probably not going to create use cases for an infrastructure project.

If not mature BA process, start with simpler, less expensive tools. Can always migrate in the future.

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Current state – what is being used now, and what problems need to be solved? What processes & techniques need to be supported?

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Let the Buyer Beware! The devil is in the details. Do your due diligence. Be thorough with your requirements and with your assessment against those requirements. If a vendor says the tool supports a particular need, make sure that it supports that need in the way that you need it to.

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You need to be flexible too! Need to be able to adapt your deliverables to the needs of your stakeholders. Assemble a toolkit that supports you.

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