Friday, June 26, 2009

ProjectWorld: Day 1, Afternoon Recap

As Kathleen Barret said in her seminar on Business Analysis, “We are the lucky few who are allowed to get out of our businesses. The conference is much smaller this year.” In the opening remarks yesterday morning, IIR also commented that most people attending ProjectWorld are wearing both their Project Management hats and their Business Analyst hats. Today is the time to be a jack of all trades. The seminars were definitely more sparsely attended then previous years (only a 110 registrants as opposed to 300-400 in previous years), but the content was still strong and practical.

More snippets from the afternoon’s sessions:

Business Analysis: Helping Business Do Business Better, Kathleen Barret

  • Times like these are okay, because the deadwood falls off the tree. There are organizations that have lost their way, and they need to restructure.
  • When your customer don’t know what to think of you, it’s hard to pull yourself up.
  • Business analysis – identifying and articulating the need for change and facility that change. If you don’t need change in your org, you don’t need BA.
  • There’s not one kind of Business Analyst: Project, Enterprise and Transition.
  • Elicitation: The Art of BA. How you get people to think very clearly about the issues and what they need to solve the problem.

How Agile Reduces Requirements Risks, Ellen Gottesdiener

  • Building software is like a knot—a big sticky, knotty problem.
  • 28% to 42.5% of software development costs go to fixing faulty requirements.
  • Top risks: scope creep, lack of customer involvement, unrealistic customer expectations, poor impact analysis, changing and practice tools.
  • Scope creep is normal. Not having changing requirements is a symptom of poor communication. The issue is, how to we manage and contain it?

If you’d like more about the seminar, you can find some Agile goodies here.

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