Business Analysis Diaries

5 easy steps to applying the entrepreneur's lesson to your next project:

Step 1) Analyze the core requirement that your deliverable is addressing.

This is very much about WHAT your deliverable is trying to achieve as oppose to HOW. The answer will give you greater flexibility when generating pilot options.

Step 2) Conceptualize a Pilot version of your deliverable that meets this requirement.
As a rule of thumb, aim to scale the solution down to about 25% of the original budget.

Step 3) Plan to pilot this release to a select set of target users.
Identify and engage your customers early. Prepare them for the release and how they can best help out. Make sure you establish several ways for them to communicate with your team.

Step 4) Set-up your development resources to respond quickly to feedback.
Make sure your own team is setup to capture and manage the changes in the following releases.

Step 5) Start planning a series of releases as required.
Be ambitious with your delivery dates. Constantly re-prioritize the tasks to maintain alignment with the overall requirement. Think Triage! Follow this up with a schedule of release dates and commit to them publicly.

5 useful WolframAlpha features for Business Analysts

WolframAlpha has finally launched and this article takes a look at some of the features that may be useful to the IT crowd. If you're looking for a good explanation of what WA is then have a look at Stephen Wolfram's intro.

1) Estimation tools

Next time you ask your developers for an estimate point them to Wolfram's excellent set of metric computations...

Spotting trends can be hard however Wolfram can give you several perspectives on simple data streams. Drop a sequence of numbers in and the output will be several computational perspectives that will help you to spot patterns or even trends. Pretty useful when building estimation models. Try these statistical examples.

2) Present Value and other financial features

Essential for Cost Benefit Analysis, Wolfram provides a several view of projected value earned over time. Here's an example.

3) Website info

Drop your own URL in and see a breakdown of statistics. Still a bit basic but I think it has potential.

4) Historical Money

Great little feature that allows you to find out the value of money at different points in time. For instance you could find out how much $100 USD in 1900 is worth today.

5) Salary and wages

Wolfram allows you to input different job titles and returns the salary stats for comparison. These can even be targeted to a specific location. I've tried a few variations with out much success but I suspect this feature will be developed as the demand ramps up.

The release of a computational search engine like WolframAlpha is a very significant event and although this tool won't compete directly with Google, I believe it's on a par. Technologists and business people should definitely take note.

8 of my favourite Agile RSS Feeds

Thought I would share the list of my favourite RSS feeds on the topic of Agile. They've helped me through some difficult times and continue to be a great resource for guidance and support.

P.s. if you're not familiar with RSS feeds have a look at this tutorial: how-to-getting-started-with-rss