Improving businesses with valuable solutions motivates a business analyst.

Curated references to business analysis for those taking on a business analysis role. This edition adds agile development references.

A business analyst can help businesses adopt agile development by showing the benefits of agile software development and the investment in changing to an agile mindset.

A good business analyst optimizes requirements for an agile development team to maximize the value and timeliness of software.

Businesses expect solutions to deliver online services comparable or better than an in-person or phone call experience. Business analysts and architects need to understand and curate requirements to develop a solution meeting these accelerated expectations.

A comprehensive map showing business analysis from discovery motivation to understanding requirements.

Start your journey as a business analyst by analyzing and filling your skill gaps. Show those who can guide you on your journey how they will benefit from helping you.

Alliances enable "hat stackers" to take on multiple roles without doing everything themselves and create change within organizations.

The best business analysts and architects dedicate themselves to understand their clients’ business, more than showing how much they know about their solutions.

Consider dependencies and urgency as well as business value when ranking requirements.

Getting help as needed from motivated staff with the best tools and communities enables an organization to do more with less.

Documenting customer terms, concepts, processes, user stories, and use cases clarifies understanding of what the customer needs for a solution.

Recording requirements and illustrating them with maps clarifies understanding of the requirements for all stakeholders.

Motivating stakeholders with solution benefits to answer key questions makes realizing the benefits faster and more accurate.

Use cases expand on user stories by introducing user interaction with the solution, fueling the launch of solution design and development.

User stories bridge discovery and design, giving solution designers and developers the big picture of what customer users do within the scope of the solution.

A process map shows stakeholders a visual layout of complex process steps, so they can understand and review the process efficiently.

Diagramming customer concepts brings all stakeholders to a common understanding of the people, places and things a customer manages in the scope of a solution.

A glossary of customer terms puts solution development on a trajectory to success.

A solution's success depends on understanding customer requirements more than any other factor.