Requirements Models and Specifications

Today we’re going to go through 22 different models BAs use in their work. You may not be aware of all 22 of them, so even if you’re familiar with a few, keep your eyes

As more organizations are working on cloud implementation projects, or leveraging software available in a SaaS (Software as a Service) environment, like Salesforce.com or ServiceNow, many business analysts feel that it isn’t necessary to capture

Do you find your developers have one follow-up question after another about how the system is really supposed to work, even though you documented the functionality in a use case? Worse yet, did your development team

When an organization is planning to move data from one system to another, planning the data migration is an important aspect of the project to ensure that the right data ends up in the right

If you come from a technical background, you might be wondering if you can skip data modeling and go right to designing and implementing the database. While you could theoretically bypass any of the data

In today’s information-rich world, we are seeing more and more data-related analysis skills in business analysis jobs. We’ve been asked several times whether business intelligence and business analysis roles are really different roles, and how

As a business analyst, it would be rare for you to complete a data dictionary on its own. Rather, it’s likely that you’ll be analyzing data requirements in combination with other business analysis techniques. In this

Are you ready to get started with data modeling, but wondering what software tools you’ll need? Have you seen some of the more complicated-looking models and wonder how you can create these with your business

You might be wondering if you need both a data dictionary and a data mapping, or you might want to make these two deliverables part of one simultaneous analysis activity. Data mapping is a special kind

Part of the value the business analyst provides is selecting techniques to ensure the requirements for a project are fully analyzed and understood. Data modeling can be a significant part of the project requirements to rightfully non-existent, even

Although data modeling techniques can look technical, you don’t need to know database programming to complete useful versions of the models from a business-facing perspective. Instead, business analysts create data models that describe the what (of

Business analysts solve tricky, icky, sticky project challenges using data modeling techniques. There are 4 data modeling techniques you should get to know as a business analyst, so they can become part of your BA

A Glossary is a deliverable that documents terms that are unique to the business or technical domain. A glossary is used to ensure that all stakeholders (business and technical) understand what is meant by the terminology,

A Data Dictionary, also called a Data Definition Matrix, provides detailed information about the business data, such as standard definitions of data elements, their meanings, and allowable values. While a conceptual or logical Entity Relationship

Author: Adriana Beal Participants who complete Crafting Better Requirements may have very different educational and professional backgrounds, but they all have one thing in common: they leave the course with a unique set of strategies

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standardized notation for creating visual models of business or organizational processes. Those new to BPMN understandably find it overwhelming. There are flow objects, connecting objects, swim lanes, and artifacts.

With all the craze about use cases lately, you’d think that no collection of requirements documentation would be complete without at least one, and perhaps several, use cases. The reality is that while use cases

Many business analysts mistakenly believe that adding a visual model to a specification – or preparing one specifically for a requirements meeting – means significant extra work.  But in reality, using the right visual modeling

Picture me: young, fresh, and disciplined…leading a very boring requirements meeting where we’re poring over a very laborious requirements document. This was way back when I was too new, too green, to know better. I

Did you know that requirements can be perfectly well documented and verified, but completely useless? This is why business analysts not only verify requirements, but also validation them. In the BABOK Guide, the purpose of Requirements

Author: Adriana Beal If you are a BA working on the IT space, you may be responsible for creating multiple deliverables, many of them intermediate documents such as meeting minutes and as-is/to be business models.

Let me share one of my more humbling experiences as a business analyst. To be perfectly blunt, the developers did not like my requirements specifications. It was hard to realize that I had failed to

Can you really have a love affair with a document? Don’t tell my husband, but the answer is “yes”. For me, the love of my business analysis professional life has been use cases. In what

A long, long time ago while working on a web-based product, a colleague of mine came up with this idea of writing a user interface or screen specification. The purpose of this requirements specification is

When you reach that point of the project where your head simply hurts from how hard you are thinking, you’ve spent hours in meetings rehashing the same concepts, and yet you and your team members

So, you’ve met with your stakeholders and elicited information about their business processes, business needs, or how the system works today. How do you actually turn this into requirements documentation? In what follows, I’ll share

In today’s climate of content exchanges and web APIs, it’s often necessary for someone with both business and technical knowledge to participate in data modeling activities or building data specifications. Dumping data into your organization’s