An Interesting View of BA Techniques

For the past few months I have been participating in a study group for the CBAP Certification.  I thought it would be fun to tackle all of the BABOK's recognized techniques from Chapter 9 in a 1 sheet study guide.  It's a simple matrix I made that will help you associate all techniques with their relevant KA's and tasks.

I hope you find it useful!

 BABOK techniques matrix

Relating Requirements Elicitation to OEC Triage

All BA's know that drawing out the important requirements for a project is critical.  The process, to me, is a lot like what I have been exposed to through outdoor emergency care and first responder training.  I spent a ski season working with my local NSP chapter, and have experience in the triage process.  From my many queries on the net, it seems that this is a comparison that other BA's have used before, but I think it helps to clarify how significant requirements elicitation really is.

Triage can be defined as the sorting of 2 or more patients based on how severe their injuries and conditions are and to prioritize medical attention.  When you are first on the scene, you must pull from all of your past experience and knowledge to assess the situation, ask the right questions, assign crews, report priority of medical attention, and so on.

As described by Alan Davis in an article he wrote entitled "The Art of Requirements Triage", choosing which requirements to prioritize during the elicitation process is very similar to triage in the medical profession. In a disaster, three groups of patients are identified; those beyond saving, those who don't need saving, and those who do need saving.  Comparing that to the elicitation process we must determine which requirements must be satisfied, need not be satisified, and should be satisfied but for which there might not be sufficient resources to accomplish. 

Here are a few links that I have found helpful to me:

The Art of Requirements Triage

Notes on The Art of Requirements Triage

Triage/MCI

Triage/MCI Questions

BABOK Guide

On-line Diagramming tools

Right now I'm checking out an article from ModernAnalyst.com about using on-line diagramming tools for day to day analyst tasks.  You can read it for yourself at "How the BA Can Take Advantage of Free Online Diagramming Tools".

The tools being reviewed are:

Gliffy (http://www.gliffy.com/)
yUML (http://yuml.me/diagram/class/samples)
Creately Online Diagramming & Design (http://creately.com)
gModeler (http://www.gskinner.com/gmodeler/launch.html)
Draw Anywhere(http://www.drawanywhere.com/)
Cacoo (http://cacoo.com/)
Flowchart (http://flowchart.com/)
Mindomo (http://mindomo.com/)
Mindmeister (http://www.mindmeister.com/)

Welcome to BA Resource

Here it is.  My personal journey as a I transition from my current job into a life-long career as a business analyst.