Larimar Consulting

Whether or not you have ever been a Business Analyst yourself, if you work with enough Business Analysts over time you learn what sort of characteristics make a BA successful.  Regardless of the Business Analyst’s skills, experience, domain knowledge or certifications, there are inherent traits that will more often than not help a person succeed [...]

Usually when a Business Analyst is working on a project the client (which I’ll define as the party or stakeholder who receives the benefit of the Analyst’s services) and the customer (the party who is paying for the Analyst to render the services) are one in the same, at least from an overall organizational perspective [...]

As spring begins to plant its roots in the Northern Hemisphere, many people will begin an annual spring cleaning of their home.  All the clutter that has accumulated over the past 3, 6, 9, or even 12 months since the last cleaning is collected, assessed and then dealt with (either by moving stuff to a [...]

Stakeholder Analysis is an important and often ongoing activity that Business Analysts perform as part of their duties.  Solution delivery team members need to understand who else is involved or impacted by their work effort, how they can interact with these people or groups, and what sort of tradeoffs exist in pleasing one group over [...]

First off, let me just say that I really like the BPMN standard, especially the 2.0 Beta specification.  I find the notation to be a powerful and expressive language that takes into account not only the standard elements in business processes but also considers all sorts of interesting possibilities that may arise.  I think the [...]

Meeting and workshop facilitators can often find themselves caught in the middle of several strong personalities trying to get their point across or convince others of their opinion.  When tempers flare the meeting might descend into a bastion of name calling, cursing, bruised egos and the potential for long term damage to personal and professional [...]

Business Analysts are often thrown into projects to help gather requirements around a known, defined problem.  Other times we’re asked to analyze the current state of a certain process, organization, system and look for ways to improve areas that are clearly lacking.  I’ve noticed that when we are brought on a project, the problems described [...]

In many Agile projects requirements are not typically written in the form of a formal requirements document.  Instead, a collection of concise but effective means of describing what must be built called user stories are often used.  User stories describe the behaviour, performance, or interface of a system from a customer’s perspective.  A typical user [...]

Sometimes you get in meetings where there a lot of diverse opinions present and a specific option must be decided upon.  If you’re not facilitating the meeting, you can easily (and justifiably) be focusing on the comments and dialogue that only align with your thoughts on the given subject.  You may find yourself wavering in [...]

I am in charge of a relatively big training effort for a project (approximately 45 live training sessions in 10 weeks, as well as online training opportunities) to assist with the deployment of a new piece of software.  The live training alone will involve over 450 people and will be quite in depth and hands [...]