Larimar Consulting

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Every year I like to reflect on my personal growth in the previous 12 months as well as decide what I’d like to focus on improving in the coming year.  As I have been reflecting on my professional development I found myself thinking about the Business Analyst profession in general.  In 2009 I have seen [...]

Over the past few years social media offerings have become an increasingly common way for people to interact with each other in the digital age.  While this revolution began in the consumer space, organizations have begun to leverage social media tools for internal operations.  Blogs, forums, prediction markets and document sharing/collaboration tools are becoming more [...]

As Business Analysis is still a relatively new profession, not every organization understands what a Business Analyst is or how they add value to an organization.  While I believe that Business Analysts should not feel they live only as a gateway to the IT organization for the rest of the business, this is one area  [...]