Tag: Tips

Preventing Disasters; How to Use Data to Your Advantage

Written by Cynthia Low on May 19, 2009. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Preventing Disasters; How to Use Data to Your Advantage

The late Lew Platt, former CEO at Hewlett-Packard once stated, “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” This is a typical situation in large organizations, where far too often, disasters arise from lack of awareness. Critical information is available in the organization, but goes undetected, is not communicated or is blatantly ignored.

Take the recent mortgage meltdown, for instance. The banking industry has a wealth of data on consumers, robust credit risk models, as well as lessons learned from the past. Their analytics told them which loans were too risky according to traditional models. Yet, they decided to relax their standards, ignore the data…and the rest is history. Or, take the recent PR debacle around Southwest Airlines’ plane inspections. The FAA had inspection logs that could have told them that the planes were passing with flying colors at unprecedented rates, yet no one suggested conducting a site visit to see if the airline was actually performing those inspections. And when low-level employees reported issues to their managers, that information was not passed on. Fortunately, in that case, a tragedy was avoided.

If there is a question we should be asking in the current economic and regulatory environment, it is “Why does accountability so often fail, and what role does analytics play in preventing these disasters?” Organizations need to understand why they fail to detect early warning signs, how to filter and monitor available data to create actionable information, and how correctly applying analytics can turn data into knowledge. That knowledge can then prevent disasters and increase competitive advantage.

Why Accountability Fails

The repeated disasters that occur due mainly to failures in accountability arise for the following reasons:

Large, complex organizations (or environments) make it difficult to know what is happening “on the ground” and detect significant changes in the environment.
Very often, players in the organization (managers, employees, others) receive incentives only for presenting a positive picture and anchor on how things have worked in the past.
Organizations measure and monitor only past-focused, outcome measures, which only indicate a disaster once it has already occurred.
Many organizations lack the skills necessary to manage data, much less apply analytical techniques to make sense of that data and keep an accurate view of the current operating reality.

The Impact of Anonymity

The lack of awareness that often brings disaster stems from the anonymity that characterizes today’s organizations. A hundred years ago, most business transactions were conducted face to face. Business owners walked the shop floor. Customers who bought eggs from the village shopkeeper knew not only the shopkeeper, but also the farmer who raised the chickens. Loans where made to people the banker knew personally and regulations were made and enforced by local officials.

The more complex an organization becomes, the less transparency there is, and the more difficult it becomes to make good decisions. Consumers and producers don’t know one another. Decision makers and implementers don’t have direct lines of communication. By the time information reaches a decision-maker at the top, it is usually highly filtered, and often inaccurate. The information and implications have been spun so as not to upset management or cast dispersion on employees, and therefore fail to present the reality of the situation.

These conditions not only impair the organization’s ability to understand what is currently going on, but also remove any ability to detect change in the environment. Outside information can effectively be closed out in extreme examples. The U.S. automakers in the 1970s, who looked out the executive suite window into their parking lot and saw only U.S.-made cars, determined that Japan was not a threat. Meanwhile, dealers in California had significant early signals in their sales numbers that Japan was indeed a threat to the U.S. auto industry.

Incentives for Bad Behavior

An even more insidious problem is that disasters often arise because organizations have actually encouraged behaviors that lead to them. The filtering of information cited above is actually a very mild form of this. Employees and managers are rewarded for highlighting what they’ve done well, so why would they ever identify something that is going wrong on their watch?

We tend to blame those who bring bad news, whether they deserve it or not. Consider any major whistle-blower of the past. The amount of scrutiny, negative media attention and damage to their career is enough to dissuade most people from taking a stance. And yet those same people brought to light, and often prevented, significant disasters in the making.

So many organizations reward those who bring in good short-term results, prove out the organization’s current business model and don’t ruffle too many feathers. In return, we get exotic financial instruments in an attempt to make quarterly revenue, low standards on food or workplace safety and fudging on project and financial status reports. The contrarian voices pointing out the impending disaster go unheard and unheeded, and changes come too late to matter.

Driving While Watching the Rear View Mirror

The vast majority of the data that organizations look at represent outcomes that are past-focused. The traditional financial statements show the outcomes of business activities (revenues, expenses, assets, liabilities, etc.) while nothing in those statements measures the underlying activity that produces those outcomes. Hence, nothing gives any indication of the current health of the organization.

Kaplan and Norton sought to remedy this with their Balanced Score Card approach. By focusing on the drivers of those outcomes, the organization should be able to monitor leading indicators to ensure the continued health of the enterprise. Relatively few organizations have fully adopted such an approach, and even those few have struggled to implement it fully. Too often, managers do not fully understand how to impact the metrics on the scorecard. And as time moves on, the scorecard can fail to keep up with changing realities, suggesting relationships between activity and outcome that no longer exist.

Numeracy?

“Numeracy” is the ability to reason with numbers. John Allen Paulos, Professor of Mathematics at Temple University, made this concept famous with his book Innumeracy, in which he bemoans how little skill our society has in dealing with mathematics, given how dependent upon it we have become. Organizations today struggle to maintain a workforce that has the skills to manage the data their operations generate. Once the data have been wrangled, the analytical reasoning skills required to make sense of that data are lacking.

Analytics provides powerful tools for dealing with massive quantities of data, and more importantly, for understanding how important relationships in our operating environment may be changing. But without a strongly numerate workforce, organizations cannot apply these techniques on their own and have a very limited ability to interpret the output of such techniques. A lack of good intuition and reasoning with numbers means that many warning signals go undetected.

What Drives Organizational Outcomes?

Organizations that want to prevent disasters and increase competitive advantage first need to define what constitutes critical information – in other words, what really matters to the organization. Prior assumptions have no place in that determination. Let’s say, for example, a company is proposing to increase its customer repeat rate by increasing satisfaction with its service. But does that relationship between customer repeat rate and satisfaction with the service really exist? And to what degree? Amazon.com, for example, does not simply assume that a person who buys a popular fiction book will want to see a list of other popular fiction books. Rather, it analyzes customer behavior. Thus, someone who is ordering Eat, Pray, Love might see an Italian cookbook, a Yoga DVD and a travel guide for Bali as recommendations because other people who bought that fiction book also bought those other items.

The steps to decide what matters are:

Decide what the organization wants to accomplish.
Identify the activities (customer behaviors and management techniques) that appear to produce that outcome.
Test and retest those relationships, collecting data from operations to measure the link between activity and outcome.

Once an organization has identified what constitutes its key activities, how can it find the information it needs to monitor them?

Find the points in the value chain where the key actions have to occur to deliver the intended outcomes.

Collect critical information at, or as close to, those points as possible. The closer an organization can get to the key points of value delivery, the more accurate the information it can collect.
Continuously look for the most direct and unfiltered route to obtain the richest, most consistent information on each key point of the value chain.
Keep testing each assumption by asking the question, “What surprising event could I see early enough to take corrective action?”

Stop Trying to Prove Yourself Right

Several traditional ways of doing business blind organizations to warning signs of potential disasters. First among these is looking for data that confirms that all is well. Although extremely counterintuitive, it is critical to look for evidence that things are not all right. Ask the question, “if something were going to cause failure, what would it be and how can it be measured?” If it can be measured, then it can be corrected early and failure can be avoided. Rather than indicating what has gone right in the past, these measures contain warnings of what could go wrong in the future.

To see the early warning signs, follow this process:

Ask what assumptions are being made in the process of executing strategy to deliver value. For example, if the goal is to increase the efficiency of inspections, is there an assumption that inspectors will become more efficient while still adhering to the same high quality standards? Or, in a call center, is there an assumption that reps can decrease call handle time and still provide superior service?
These assumptions are alert points where failure might occur. Don’t wait for the final outcome, but track, measure and monitor each assumption to make sure it is playing out successfully. This process is well known to project managers. They don’t just design Work Breakdown Structures and Critical Paths and then wait around for the end date to see if the project was successful. As soon as a task begins to exceed its scope, the impact is assessed all the way down the line.
Keep testing each assumption by asking the question, “What surprising event could I see early enough to take corrective action?”

Organizations that do this well are not operating with a negative, doom-and-gloom perspective. Rather, they want their positive outcomes so badly that they look for data that might be telling them something is going wrong so they can correct it before it is too late. They are willing to “Fail Fast” and “Fail Forward,” keeping the failure small to ensure large successes.

People Power the Process

Creating knowledge from data to prevent disasters depends on both technology and human skill. Computers are powerful tools that can help collect, store, aggregate, summarize and process data, but the human brain is needed to analyze the data and turn it into actionable information. It’s this human factor where the biggest gap exists in most organizations. Finding people who can perform the required analysis is becoming increasingly difficult. A spreadsheet is just a pile of data until someone applies critical thinking, adding subjective experience and industry knowledge to derive insights into what the numbers really mean.

Organizations must invest in developing these skills in their workforce. Here’s how:

Provide employees with the training, job assignment, education and mentoring opportunities needed to develop their analytical skills, industry expertise and decision-making acumen.
Subject decision-making to evidence-based approaches, providing feedback to improve future decisions.
Ensure employees have the tools they need to manage the volumes of data they are expected to digest and act upon.

Blame Is Not an Option

In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge said that a “learning organization” depends on a blame-free culture. In other words, when a problem arises, people need to refocus from laying blame or escaping blame and start fixing the problem.

In today’s data-rich world, preventing disasters large and small requires monitoring and filtering through the large volumes of information that stream into organizations every day to find early warning signs of imminent failure. Intellectually, just about everyone will agree that it makes sense to look for what could go wrong. Emotionally, however, it’s another matter. It is both counterintuitive and intimidating to ask managers to search out constantly how the organization is failing. Establishing a blame-free culture is the final frontier to create a new awareness and encourage people to test assumptions, make better use of analytics and communicate information without fear.

Charles Caldwell is Practice Lead, Analytics, with Management Concepts. Headquartered in Vienna, VA, and founded in 1973, Management Concepts is a global provider of training, consulting and publications in leadership and management development. For further information, visit www.managementconcepts.com or call 703 790-9595.

Seven Tips to Ensure Requirements Management Success

Written by Cynthia Low on March 24, 2009. Posted in Articles.

The path to building great software goes through requirements management. It’s easy to forget some times, but the world relies on great software. Software operates the cars we drive, the planes we fly in, the cell phones we can’t live without and the tools we use every day to get our jobs done. Software is everywhere.

As a software professional, you know all too well that software development isn’t easy. A software product is never completed. There’s always an opportunity to improve functionality and there’s no shortage of challenges to overcome along the way:

Lots of people involved in the process
Customers have difficulty articulating their real needs
Requirements constantly change
Teams are spread across multiple geographies
There’s growing pressure to release products faster
The complexity of software doubles every 2-3 years
More projects fail than succeed

Whether you’re building a revenue-generating product or an internal system, your company’s overall success largely relies on your software team’s success. And, the path to building great software goes through requirements management. Organizations that embrace this concept enjoy greater results. They experience fewer errors and frustration, faster planning and development cycles and they’re able to deliver higher quality products to their customers.

What You’ll Learn: The goal of this article is to provide you seven essential tips to help you be more successful with requirements management. For some, these tips might be new. For others, these tips will serve as a good reminder of the fundamentals that are easy to lose sight of during the heat of a project.

Tip #1. Stay Connected

You can eliminate most issues by keeping everyone connected.

Much attention is placed on the high failure rates of software projects, and for good reason. Any time there’s billions of dollars at stake and failure rates ranging between 60%-80%, people are going to pay attention. But, what you don’t hear as much about is the root cause. Last year, in The State of Requirements Management Report we polled over 200 professionals about the top challenges they faced in eliminating project failure, and the resounding theme boiled down to one thing – communication. If you can get connected and stay connected throughout the entire development process, you can eliminate the vast majority of issues.

Terminology	Simple Definition
Collaboration	Keeping your entire team connected throughout the development process
Traceability	Keeping all the requirements, artifacts and other related information connected

There are two parts to staying connected. First, there’s the connectedness of your team, which has been popularized recently as “collaboration” – new buzzword, same meaning. Analysts, project managers, developers, testers, product managers, executives, stakeholders and customers – is everyone on the same page about what you’re building and why?

Keeping everyone connected is often easier said than done, but it’s absolutely critical to the success of your project. Depending on the size and location of your team, you can do this manually through meetings, phone calls and documents or you can use a tool to help keep your team connected. It depends on your situation and the complexity of what you’re building. See Tip #7 for the tipping points when a tool might be valuable.

Second, there’s traceability – the act of connecting up the requirements and other artifacts such as use cases, test cases, tasks, defects and even user documentation – all the details that are related to each other within a project. For complex development projects, there can easily be hundreds or thousands of items involved and it’s critical to establish the traceability relationships between these items – both upstream and downstream.

For example, when a high-level business requirement changes 30 days into a project, through trace relationships you can immediately assess the impact it has on any downstream functional requirements, tasks and defects that a developer or tester might be working on. This helps minimize errors and costly rework because the team members affected are aware of the specific change and its impact.

Implementing traceability and a change control process that’s appropriate for your situation is one of the most important steps to ensuring success. As a simple first step to establishing change control, you can use a change request form manually to document changes right now.

Tip #2. Take Action Now

Don’t wait for your process to be “perfect.”

Doing something is better than nothing. It’s easy to fall victim to what you might call “process perfectitis” – a condition reached by teams that get paralyzed by process and analysis versus delivering working software. How many times have you heard someone say, “Well, we’ll get to that project as soon as we really lock down our process? ” Is any process perfect? More importantly, should that really be your team’s highest goal?

Whether your team is practicing some flavor of Agile or not, there’s one thing we can all take away from the principles of Agile – it’s that working software is the primary measure of progress. Don’t get us wrong, optimizing your process is important, very important. We’re constantly tweaking our process. However, if you have a better process and no product, you still have nothing to show your customers.

Doing something is better than nothing. Start small, identify a few critical requirements and take the approach of continuous improvement where you build, reflect, refine and repeat. Then, with each release cycle you’ll learn more about the needs of your customers and continuously improve and expand upon the software solution you deliver to them. If you think your team suffers from process perfectitis, look for these symptoms:

•· Requirements definition phase seems to drag on and on and on

•· In the last month more time when spent talking about process, while your product stayed the same

•· Lack of a decision-maker to make the call when to move forward with development

Tip #3. Eliminate Ambiguity

Successful requirements management begins with writing good requirements.

One of the things you can do immediately is make a “do not use” word list and post it up on the walls in your office. Visual reminders will help you to avoid using ambiguous terms when writing requirements. Karl Wiegers, a well-respected requirements management consultant, in his book Software Requirements provides a good list of ambiguous terms to avoid in requirements specifications. Here’s a snapshot of a few them.

Ambiguous Terms	Ways to Improve Them
fast	Specify the minimum acceptable speed which the system performs some action.
flexible	Describe the ways in which the system must change in response to changing conditions or business needs.
acceptable, adequate	Define what constitutes acceptability and how the system can judge this.
simple, easy	Describe system characteristics that will achieve the customer’s needs and usability expectations.
shouldn’t	Try to state requirements as positives, describing what the system will do, instead of what it won’t do.
robust	Define how the system is to handle exceptions and respond to unexpected operating conditions.

Source: Software Requirements by Karl Wiegers, 2nd Edition, Microsoft Press, 2003

Tip #4. Reconnect with Your Customer

You don’t have to be an expert to capture the voice of your customer – just committed.

This may sound obvious, but it’s easy to lose sight of customer needs as a project gets underway and the team gets to work building the solution. Keep in mind, we use the word “customers” to refer the end-users of the product you’re building – these customers could be external consumers for commercial products or internal users in the case of internal IT systems where other departments and employees are your customers.

Capturing the voice of the customer isn’t a one-time effort. Most project teams do a thorough requirements gathering session at the beginning of a project, but rarely does the customer interaction carry through to the end. Successful requirements management practices include constant communication with customers. Otherwise you risk falling into the classic trap of delivering a product that end-users reject because it doesn’t resonate with how they expect to use it.

There’s definitely an art to eliciting feedback and requirements from customers and clearly some people are better at it than others. There’s a plethora of books and courses out there to provide training for this specific skill. However, you don’t need to be a requirements management expert to capture the voice of your customers. The fundamental skill required is commitment. Commit to picking up the phone every week and talking to customers. Commit to getting out of your office and sitting down with customers in their real environments. These are things everyone on the team can do, and should do. Even in Agile it’s not always possible to have an on-site customer present, so you have to commit to getting that feedback other ways.

Here’s a quick list of Dos and Don’ts to follow as reminders for how to stay connected to your customers.

Dos	Don’ts
Be a journalist – ask open-ended questions	Think you know best what customers want
Talk to your customers every week	Assume past experience is representative of current needs
Be open and flexible to change	Assume customer needs are static
Just pick up the phone and call customers	Elicit requirements & feedback only at the start of a project
Listen with an open mind during elicitation	Sell customer on your idea for how a solution should work
Sit with a customer and watch how they work	Assume customers know how to articulate their exact needs
Close the loop with customers when their feedback has been implemented in the product	Forget to capture and share the evidence you gather with your team

Tip #5. Prioritize Objectively

Avoid building functionality that customers don’t need and may never use.

Development time is so valuable. There’s nothing more frustrating for everyone than wasting time building features that customers don’t actually use and don’t provide value back to your company.

This is where requirements prioritization is essential. You need to avoid the common pitfalls of building features that seem cool or that someone thought a customer might need. Too often, requirements prioritization happens subjectively. The team holds a meeting and in a debate over the requirements the loudest voice wins; or a request comes in from a salesperson who just spoke to a customer and the most top-of-mind request becomes the hottest priority du jour. With each new feature request or high-level requirement, ask these questions to determine if this is a must-have or a nice-to-have feature:

What percentage of our customers will benefit from it?
Does it fit our brand values and enhance a competitive differentiator?
What is the trade-off if we prioritize this ahead of other requirements?

It’s best to establish an objective prioritization model that quantifies the variables that matter most and that each high-level requirement gets evaluated against. That way, by getting agreement on the scoring model, it’s easier to get consensus on the highest priority requirements your team should focus on, objectively.

Tip #6. Minimize Overhead Select the right tools to get the job done.

If you’re a small team in the same office developing a fairly straight-forward product, you can use a whiteboard, task cards and daily face-to-face meetings to manage requirements. A specialized tool in this case could create unnecessary overhead. Likewise, if your team is building a product where the requirements are all agreed upon upfront and won’t change much throughout the course of development, then documents and periodic status meetings may work just fine.

As projects grow in complexity and teams grow in size and geography, so do the communication challenges and overhead of trying to keep everyone and everything in sync. It’s in these scenarios, where a requirements management tool can add value because the overhead of using the tool is far less than the manual overhead it takes to keep track of changes, manage trace relationships, update documents and communicate with everyone on the team.

Here’s a checklist of a few common tipping points where a specialized tool makes sense and can help reduce overhead by automating the process of keeping people and all the related information connected.

Variable	Tipping Point	Benchmarks
Complexity	The more complex the project, the greater the need. If you have over 100 requirements.	72% of teams have projects that on average have 100+ requirements.
Team Size	The bigger the team, the greater the need. If you have over 25 people involved.	Over 40% of teams have at least 25 members and stakeholders.
Location	The more geographically distributed the team, the greater the need. If 10%+ are virtual.	Over 60% of teams have at least 10% of their team working in different locations.
Change	The more changes, the greater the need. If you spend 10% or more of your time managing changes to requirements.	Over two-thirds of teams spend 10% or more of their time managing change.
Traceability	If traceability is a priority for meeting standards or government regulation, a tool is valuable for automating the management of trace relationships, change control and version history.

Benchmarks: The State of Requirements Management Report by Jama Software and Ravenflow, 2008

Tip #7. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel There are many existing templates and resources you can leverage right away.

Even though every company, project and team is unique, the resources needed to help you be successful, in most cases, already exist. In minutes you can do a search on Google and find a wealth of best practices information. As a starting point, here’s a link to more resources from Jama Software and Karl Wiegers for free companion resources to this article: http://www.jamasoftware.com/requirements_management_resources.php

Eric Winquist is CEO and founder of Jama Software. In March 2006, Eric founded Jama with the vision of providing customers a more collaborative way to develop new products and eliminate the common frustrations with traditional approaches to requirements management. Eric is an accomplished entrepreneur, business analyst and project manager with over 14 years experience working with a wide range of organizations. Previous to Jama, Eric founded Redside Solutions, a software development consulting firm.

John Simpson is director of customer outreach, Jama Software. John represents the voice of the customer and leads Jama’s product strategy and communications. John has over 12 years experience working at software technology companies including Microsoft, WebTrends and Omniture. He has contributed to several books, whitepapers and presentations.

They can both be reached through the following: 503.922.1058 [email protected] I www.jamasoftware.com 3/09

Top Ten Tips for Tackling the CBAP Exam

Written by Cynthia Low on March 17, 2009. Posted in Articles.

It’s no surprise that the certification of business analysts is more sought after today than ever before. Worldwide the demand for qualified practitioners, and the ability for them to quickly demonstrate their capabilities in requirements management and development, continues to grow.

Growing almost as quickly is the number of people taking the Certified Business Analysis ProfessionalTM (CBAP®) exam. The 150-question exam is based on the International Institute of Business Analysts’ (IIBA®) Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®). This constantly evolving business analyst’s handbook reflects the most current, generally accepted business practices, and is one of the best references in preparing for the challenging multiple-choice exam.

So what does this mean to you? For those looking to take their careers forward, or to give themselves an advantage over the competition in the job market, the CBAP certification can mean an advanced career path, documented professional expertise and a positive impact on your organization. The exam is as challenging as the certification is valuable, but the time you take to prepare, from collecting and submitting your extensive application materials, is well worthwhile.

As with any standardized testing, there are literally hundreds of sources for information, tips and strategies. From that mountain of information, here are 10 widely recognized best practices for applying for, preparing for and taking the CBAP exam.

Take your time, part 1. Even applying to sit for the exam will take a significant amount of time. Most experts and CBAPs agree that you should give yourself at least eight hours total to complete the application. Yes, you read that right. Eight total hours. (When you read #2 below, you’ll understand why.)

Read each question and section carefully. Answer to the best of your ability and take the time to really focus on the application.

To further minimize omissions and errors – or the odds of having your application rejected – always use the IIBA-supplied templates, available with the application at http://www.theiiba.org/ under “get certified.”
Know the requirements and fees. To successfully apply for the exam, you must demonstrate your professional experience, specifically in indentifying business needs and determining the best solutions for business problems. The completed application must meet the following five requirements:
1. Work Experience: 7,500 hours of verifiable, hands-on business analysis work over the 10 years preceding your exam application.
2. Knowledge Areas: Demonstrable experience and expertise in at least four of the six knowledge areas: Enterprise Analysis, Requirements Planning and Management, Requirements Elicitation, Requirements Analysis and Documentation, Requirements Communication, Solution Assessment and Validation, and Business Analysis Fundamentals.
3. Education: High school or equivalent
4. Professional Development: 21 hours of verifiable coursework in the past four years, directly related to business analysis.
5. References: Two references from a career manager, client (internal or external) or CBAP are required. These references must indicate that you are a suitable candidate for the CBAP® certification.
  
  Next, consider applying for IIBA membership before applying for the exam. As you will see below, the fee schedule for the exam varies, depending on whether or not you are an IIBA member, with savings of $125 for members (exactly the amount of the application fee). Consider the idea that you will probably join IIBA after gaining your certification- so why not essentially apply for “free?”
  
  Fees:

IIBA® membership fee:	$95 USD	Paid annually.
Application Fee	$125 USD	This fee pays for the processing and administration of your application. It is non-refundable.
Exam Fee – for IIBA®Members	$325 USD	The fee pays for the initial exam sitting and will NOT be reimbursed if you do not pass the exam.
Exam Fee – for non-IIBA® Members	$450 USD	The fee pays for the initial exam sitting and will NOT be reimbursed if you do not pass the exam.

Please note: You can submit both the application and the exam fees with your application. If your application is declined, you will be reimbursed the exam fee.

Know your study style. Once you’ve applied, you can then expect to devote a substantial amount of your time and attention to preparation. Experts estimate total “ideal” study time at anywhere from six weeks to six months.

Before jumping in, have a clear understanding of how you learn and retain information. This point can’t be stressed enough. Quite simply, what many people forget, especially if they haven’t taken an examination in some time, is that not every study method works for every person.

For example, you may be a visual learner, or perhaps you remember spoken words more readily. Do you do better taking classes and interacting with others or working through study guides on your own? Tailoring your preparation to your style will save you hours – if not days – of frustration and increase your confidence on exam day.
Know your resources. With the vast number of available study methods and resources, narrow your choices by creating a list of study resources and be very selective, keeping in mind your personal style (#3 above). CBAP study guides featuring practice examinations are available, as well as business analysis courses to help you prepare for the exam, maintain your certification, and build upon your existing skills.

Regardless of the preparation regimen you ultimately choose, it’s wise to contact your local IIBA chapter. Many chapters offer study groups, or you can leverage the knowledge of peers who have already achieved their CBAP® certification.
Get a flash of brilliance. Even in this age of palm-sized computers and high-speed mobile Internet, one popular preparation method is decidedly “low-tech.” Many CBAPs laud flash cards as study tools for exam terms and definitions of each knowledge area – so much so that the study technique is actually featured in many preparation courses. Even if you’ve chosen not to take a formal course, consider making some flash cards for yourself. They’re an easy, efficient way to study anywhere.
Demonstrate intimate knowledge. Memorizing terms and knowing the BABOK is just one part of passing the CBAP exam. Since the exam uses situational scenarios throughout, understanding of language, usage and context for all six knowledge areas is also very important. Success depends on your ability to align your business analysis experience with the exam questions.
Know your activities. Next, memorize the tasks and activities within each knowledge area. If you aren’t already, become familiar with the input and output of each activity across all knowledge areas. Knowing what you’re supposed to get out of a solution will increase your confidence as you work your way through the examination.
You can get a feel for activities by creating your own small models for each knowledge area or by using the models included in many of the available classes or guides.
Know your modeling. Usage, process, flow, data and behavior models are all areas tested on the exam. Since the exam focuses on practical, situation-based questions, it’s very important to devote significant time to practicing modeling and more importantly, becoming familiar with when to apply each.
Practice, Practice, Practice. All the studying in the world is for naught if you’re surprised when you sit down for the actual exam. Whatever your preparation method, be sure to develop a plan for practicing with CBAP-format questions or full-blown practice examinations. Set aside three hours, find a quiet spot, and work your way through. After a few practice exams, and knowing exactly what to expect, the real one won’t seem so intimidating.
Take your time, part 2. The night before the exam, don’t try to cram or re-read the BABOK. Just get a good night’s rest – it is a three-hour-long, taxing test, and being focused and alert is the best favor you can do for yourself.

On the day of the exam, dress comfortably and bring paper and pencil to work out your answers. Most testing facilities provide these, but it never hurts to be prepared.

If you’ve memorized items, you are allowed to write on the exam booklet, so get them written down before you begin – it will give you one less thing to think about.

Finally, put everything you’ve learned to use and pace yourself. You’re not scored on how quickly you complete the exam and rushing leads to costly mistakes. If you do not pass the exam, you must wait three months before you are allowed to re-take it.

Scoring the exam takes up to 30 days and results will include knowledge area breakdowns for those who have not passed.

Without proper preparation, the CBAP examination can be intimidating. However, if you solidify your skills and knowledge and take advantage of your experience as a Business Analysis professional, you’ll have your certification sooner than you think.

Good luck.

Glenn R. Brûlé, Executive Director, Client Solutions, ESI International, is author of CBAP Exam: Practice Test and Study Guide, First Edition. He has more than 18 years experience in many facets of business, including project management, business analysis, software design and facilitation. At ESI International, he is responsible for supporting a global team of business consultants working with Fortune 1000 organizations. These engagements focus on understanding, diagnosing and providing workable business solutions to complex problems across various industries. Glenn is a Member of the Board of Directors and Vice President of Chapters of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA). For more information, visit http://www.esi-intl.com/.

Seven Tips for Managing Your Online Reputation

Written by Cynthia Low on February 10, 2009. Posted in Articles.

In a competitive job market, a polished professional reputation can make or break someone’s chances of landing a coveted position. And since the word google became a verb, that reputation includes information that can be found online. This is particularly true for IT professionals who are evaluated on their technical savvy.

As a growing number of employers search the Internet for information about job seekers, it’s become more important for applicants to actively monitor and maintain their professional reputations online. The current economic environment has made hiring managers increasingly cautious, and any information that raises a red flag can quickly take candidates out of consideration for a job.

Following are seven practical tips to help you manage your digital imprint

Take stock. Discover what information about you — if any — already is online by performing a search using popular search engines. If you discover an item that you wouldn’t want hiring managers to see, ask the person who posted the information or website administrator to remove it. Similarly, untag any inappropriate photos of yourself.
Activate privacy settings. If you belong to social networking sites or have a personal blog, adjust your privacy settings so you control who has access.
Exercise discretion. When interacting online, be selective about which venues you participate in and who you allow into your personal and professional networks. If you regularly contribute to blogs or forums, give thought as to how your statements may be interpreted by those outside your community. Consider using a pseudonym if you wouldn’t want a potential employer to see your posts. You can use BlogPulse or Technorati to track online conversations about you or your sites.
Network wisely. When using professional networking sites such as LinkedIn to look for job opportunities, behave graciously with everyone you encounter and follow posted protocols. Thank anyone who assists you, and be sure to return the favor when possible.
Stack the deck. Business information websites such as ZoomInfo allow users to post information about themselves, so consider including details about your professional involvement and qualifications on these types of forums.
Share your insights. Posting useful advice and commentary on industry forums and authoring online articles in your area of expertise can add to your credibility.
Monitor the conversation. Set alerts using Google or other tracking services under your name so you receive an e-mail notification every time something new is said about you online.

Professionals should always post prudently — not just when they’re looking for work. The business world is more transparent than ever, which means people need to be aware that what they say and do online can have both positive and negative consequences.

Dave Wilmer is Executive Director of Robert Half Technology, a leading provider of information technology professionals. Robert Half Technology offers online job search services at www.rht.com. For additional tips on conducting an online job search, download a free copy of Search Smarts: Best Practices for Conducting an Online Job Search at http://www.rhi.com/onlinejobsearch.

Ten Tips for Writing Effective E-mail Messages

Written by Cynthia Low on April 30, 2008. Posted in Articles.

Plan the message before you write it. Before writing, ask yourself, “Why am I writing this – what do I want my reader to know and/or do?” When you have the answer, state it at the beginning of your message – this is your main point.

Organize the information in your message to support the main point. Delete any unnecessary information. Use short paragraphs and bullet points for lists – these make the message easier to read on a screen.
Identify the right recipients. Don’t send the message to people who don’t need the information.
Check the content of the message. Make sure there is nothing confidential, personal, inappropriate, or offensive.
Check the tone of the message. Make sure it doesn’t sound angry, rude, or abrupt.
Choose the appropriate salutation and closing. Depending on the audience, salutations and closings can be formal, informal, or casual.
Proofread the message. Fix any grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.
Craft a compelling subject line that will tell the reader exactly what the message is about and allow the reader to file and find the message easily later on.
Make sure attachments are attached. It’s usually best to include attachments as PDFs.
Include a signature with your contact information. Be sure to include your name, company name, and phone number.

Natasha Terk,

President of Write It Well (www.writeitwell.com), works with a team of skilled instructional designers and trainers to develop and deliver customized on-site and online training solutions about written communications.