RSBA Technology

What Is A Business Analyst?

I was recently asked to define the role of a business analyst. People generally get what a developer ("writes code"), tester ("tests code") and project manager ("GANTT charts") do. Isn't that sufficient to deliver systems on time and on budget? Maybe, but what about those tricky things called "requirements"?

I wrote a short paper which identifies key tasks and success factors related to the ill-defined project role of a “business analyst”. It is based from on my own professional work experience as a business analyst over the past 20 years, across a variety of organisations (software firms, multi-national investment banks) and domain areas within the investment banking industry (buy-side, sell-side, front / middle / back office).

In conclusion, requirements elicitation and management should be considered a separate engineering discipline, alongside the more well-known roles. The business analyst role needs specific skills and training to be effective. The most effective practitioners recognise that the core tasks of requirement elicitation and capture are actually rooted in core engineering disciplines and principles of quantification, decomposition (of complex things into simpler, atomic statements) and
validation.

Please download and read the full What Is A Business Analyst? paper.

Please get in touch to discuss further, or leave comments below. - Comments: 0

In March 2014, I met the founders of 1060Research at a training course given by Tom Gilb held at the British Computer Society in London. Over the past 12 years, Peter Rodgers and Tony Butterfield have developed the concept of something they named Resource-Orientated Computing ("RoC"), which attempts to bring the scaleability and zero-coupling economy of the world - wide web into the domain of individual applications. The NetKernel platform is their concrete, production-hardened implementation of the RoC principles. In a short 40 minute presentation, I saw enough to be immediately intrigued by this new approach.

In a nutshell, RoC and NetKernel focus on the information (or "resources") present in a software system as the primary architectural and compositional entity, rather than the physical code. In fact, everything becomes a resource, including the application state , but also the code itself, and all of the configuration needed to wire up the application. To the kernel, everything is normalised to the same core few ideas of requests, endpoints, representations and resolution. Once you have understood this, everything changes compared with the static object-orientated programming model.

Over the next few weeks, I read through much of the extensive documentation, installed the NetKernel server, watched some Youtube videos and walked through some of the available tutorials.

I then decided the best way to really gain a working understanding of RoC and NetKernel was to implement a real-world application based in some of my recent work experience. I also decided to keep a detailed diary of my progress through the implementation, recording lessons learnt and issues encountered along the way. I therefore started work on the NK-PKS prototype project, which I open-sourced on my github page. The "PKS Diary' documentation is embedded in the main PKS NetKernel module, and can be viewed in the NetKernel Documentation portal once the NK-PKS modules have been installed in a NK instance. - Comments: 0

A Competitive Engineering Case Study: Price Sentinel

I have just uploaded a new PDF document to the Files page.

This paper describes a single case study of a project management approach known as Requirements Engineering or Competitive Engineering (“CE”), developed by Tom and Kai Gilb. It demonstrates the benefits of re-casting stated business requirements as quantified stakeholder value objectives, focusing all project effort on maximizing the improvement of those value objectives for minimal cost by delivering real measurable improvements to those stakeholders early and often. - Comments: 0

Competitive Engineering Presentation on Prezi

A few years ago, I created a presentation on the core principles of Competitive Engineering on www.prezi.com. I have embedded it into this blog post.

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