How to Communicate Requirements to Stakeholders
Communicating requirements to stakeholders outside your immediate team is one of the most practically demanding parts of BA work. This article covers how to adapt your artefacts, structure your documents, and present requirements in a way that lands with finance, legal, operations, and senior leadership audiences. Real worked example included.
How to Write Non-Functional Requirements
Writing non-functional requirements is one of those tasks that trips up even experienced BAs because the formats most teams default to were designed around user-facing behaviour. This article walks through three practical approaches for capturing system rules, constraints, and non-functionals, with guidance on choosing the right one for each situation. If you have a requirement sitting in front of you right now that does not fit neatly into a user story, this is where to start.
Stakeholder Engagement: A Practical BA Guide
Stakeholder engagement is one of the most consequential things a business analyst does, and one of the easiest to get wrong. This guide gives you a practical framework for identifying, analysing, and maintaining meaningful stakeholder involvement across the life of a project. Drawn from 25 years of BA practice, it covers the techniques, pitfalls, and friction points that classroom training rarely prepares you for.
Elicitation Techniques: Which to Use and When
Choosing the right elicitation techniques is one of the most consequential decisions you make at the start of any requirements project. This guide walks through all nine core methods, their trade-offs, and how to combine them in practice. Includes a worked example from a real project where the approach had to be rebuilt mid-stream.
Problem Solving Steps for Business Analysts
When you are facing a complex business problem, having a structured set of problem solving steps makes the difference between spinning your wheels and moving forward with confidence. This article walks through the four core steps I use across every type of BA engagement, from government reform to enterprise system replacement. It also covers the most common problems you will hit along the way and how to handle them.
Business Analyst Skills: The Complete Guide
Knowing which business analyst skills to develop next is more useful than a generic list of competencies. This guide maps the hard skills, soft skills, and BABOK competency areas that matter most in practice, with honest guidance on where most analysts fall short and how to fix it.
Business Analyst Roles and Responsibilities Explained
Business analyst roles and responsibilities vary far more than most job descriptions let on. Whether you are stepping into a BA role for the first time or trying to understand where your current work fits, this article breaks down what the role actually involves across different levels, specialisations and working arrangements.
Business Analysis Planning: A Practical Guide
Business analysis planning is the activity that shapes everything else on a project. Get it right and your stakeholders trust your process. Get it wrong and you spend the rest of the engagement catching up. This guide walks you through the practical steps, the common traps, and what a good plan actually looks like in the real world.
How to Get Up to Speed on a New Project Fast
When you need to get up to speed on a new project fast, waiting for more information is rarely an option. This article gives you a structured set of questions to move from uncertainty to active contribution, even when the domain is completely unfamiliar. Work through them in order and you will know what you need to find out, who to talk to, and what to do with what you learn.