Transcript of 1-25

10.1 acceptance & or evaluation criteria. These are really just requirements that must be met in order to give a solution, feature, or a pass or fail. The difference between the two is that acceptance criteria are typically used for something under development, as a user story in a sprint and evaluation criteria are more common when you are comparing features of different software that you are potentially acquiring. You should expect to do this a lot as a BA.

10.2 Backlog management is basically how your scrum team manages your backlog in terms of definitions of ready, definitions of done, and so forth. I would definitely look into researching scrum backlog practices for this one.

10.3 Balanced scorecard is a technique intended to gauge the health of your organization. It involves measuring 4 categories. Customer Satisfaction, Employee Growth, Business Process Efficiency, and Financials. I honestly can’t imagine an entry-level business analyst being asked to do this, because it might include some tough conversations with some high-level people. In fact, to truly be unbiased, I could see a consulting agency doing this for a company

10.4 Benchmarking and marketing analysis is simply a way of comparing how you are doing to industry standards. The important thing here is to make sure you are comparing the right measures, but otherwise, conceptually it is pretty straight forward. If every competitor does A, B, and C, you have to measure how well you are doing A, B, and C.

10.5 Brainstorming is an umbrella term for coming up with ideas. You can brainstorm alone or you can facilitate brainstorming with a group.It involves good preparation with context areas and having the right people involved. It involves creating an environment for all people to share and explore freely and without judgment and finally, it involves outputting everything that was collected in a valuable manner.

10.6 Business Capability Analysis is similar to benchmarking in that you are essentially comparing to a standard of some kind. This is another thing I’d expect to happen with an experienced business analyst and likely from a consulting company. Often times its depicted as a bunch of boxes which organized by category and color-coded for like a pass, fail, and maybe some nuances in between.

10.7 Business Cases is basically something you write to justify spending time, resources, and money for a project to change something or buy something. It would likely include items from the balanced scorecard and how it’ll improve them.

10.8 Business Model Canvas is just a standard way to essentially show what your organization does and how it produces value. It very is reminiscent of what Enterprise Architects do which is a common career path for business analysts.

10.9 Business Rules Analysis basically documents the policies in which a business operates and helps inform how to formulate a business process. For example, a business rule might be that you don’t sell to people under 18. That might mean that the business process needs to have a step to validate age and paths for passing or failing age verification.

10.10 Collaborative Games are basically activities the help groups of people essentially create focus and direction for what the group needs to accomplish. In my own experience, I’ve used affinity mapping many times since its easy for people to understand and participate. It also gets people up and moving around.

10.11 Concept Modelling at a high level is just taking a bunch of terms or concepts from your domain and modeling out how they all relate to each other. I find them fun to make and extremely useful in understanding a new domain or helping others understand a domain. It is what I recommend BA when they first start a new project

10.12 Data Dictionary is basically a glossary for all your data. It often uses slightly more complex organization structures than say a dictionary and helps create an understanding of all the elements involved in a system. For example, you might define a person as a thing, and define a child as a subcategory of a person defined by an age range, then adult… you get the idea. Facilitates clarity.

10.13 Data Flow Diagrams are pretty key business analyst diagrams. They basically illustrate applications and what data flows between them. It helps create a sort of context in understanding what teams need to be worked with when something is going to change. 

10.14 Data Mining comes in two forms, looking at data to find an answer to a question, or look at data with no question to answer just to see what it tells you. Data helps inform a lot of decisions, so you should be comfortable doing some degree of data analysis to better perform your job as a business analyst. 

10.15 Data Modelling is a way to document how data is organized typically using standard notations. It often is used to model how databases structures will actually be organized. There is value in understanding data modeling to better understand and communicate constraints or opportunities in making decisions related to data.

10.16 Decision Analysis is about organizing information to make it easier to make a decision. There are different ways to accomplish this, but a common method is a scorecard with all the variables listed, values assigned and weighted, and seeing how different choices stack up side by side.

10.17 Decision Modelling is more focused on visualizing how the decisions are made and the outcomes. A decision model would theoretically be a big cascade of business rules.

10.18 Document Analysis is probably the most boring and one of the most used techniques of a business analyst. It’s literally learning from looking at existing documentation. Could be manuals, help documents, or documents created by a previous business analyst. It typically helps you build a degree of understanding so you can make the best of your time when in meetings and such.

10.19 Estimation for a business analyst is another big umbrella category of many techniques to estimate the future value of something. Most organizations have standards for how they prefer to estimate things, but if it’s something that impacts your work a lot, it could be valuable to explore different methods of estimation.

10.20 Financial Analysis revolves around assessing the benefit to the bottom line, usually over time and is one reason by business analyst new hires are business majors focused in IT because they would have had to take some finance and accounting classes. The more senior you become the more likely you’ll have to deal more and more with the financial aspects of projects.

10.21 Focus Groups are typically used to basically ask a group of people how they feel about something. For example, and HR business analyst working on a project for new hires onboarding might have a focus group with a bunch of new hires to ask how they felt about their experience.

10.22 Functional Decomposition is basically breaking down a high-level thing into its lower-level parts. This might mean breaking down a business requirement into the functional requirements for each part or system that needs to change, or Epics/Features down into user stories. You’ll be doing this a lot as a business analyst. It’s kinda like your main thing.

10.23 is a Glossary. Basically, if you have a bunch of nuanced terms or acronyms in your space, keeping a glossary will help you and anybody new to space.

10.24 Interface Analysis for a business analyst is looking at any interface whether its data interfaces, user interfaces, application interfaces, and basically documenting what’s there and why it exists. Very important to know before making changes to something.

10.25 is Interviews. Its how you learn stuff from people and I really hope you already knew that. The only thing I’ll say here is to make sure you have a goal for the interview before conducting it to help focus the conversation.