Archive for the ‘Agile Business Analysis’ Category

Scaling agile for the enterprise

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

When describing development mindsets, it can almost be as if you are labeling an organization’s personality.  If the company subscribes to rigorous methodologies, it’s Type A – highly structured and rules-heavy, with an emphasis on getting it right according to a pre-determined plan.  On the other hand, if the company embraces agile methods, it’s Type B – cool and relaxed, with an emphasis on innovation, regardless of plan.

Right?

As we all know, it’s not quite that black and white.  Increasingly, organizations are finding that a blend of methods  – leveraging the best of both approaches – is the ideal.  But scaling agile methods to larger, complex and mission-critical projects can be difficult.

We’ve partnered with IconATG to help you learn how to best incorporate agile methods into a rigorous development environment, by leveraging use cases for visualization and validation through each iteration of the project.

We’re celebrating the launch of this partnership with a complimentary webinar, “Requirements Engineering in an Agile Environment,” on Tuesday, Sept. 14 at 10 a.m. PDT.

Join us to learn:

  • How to effectively scale your agile development environment
  • Why, when, and how use cases make sense
  • How to incorporate use cases into agile development
  • How to work with use cases during inception, elaboration, and construction
  • How RAVEN can help analyze and visualize use cases to get requirements right

Pre-registration is required.  Click here to reserve your seat.

To learn more about our new partnership with IconATG, click here to read the press release.

Effectiveness Reviews: How to increase the ROI you’re achieving from Deltek Vision

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

An Effectiveness Review is a chance to revisit how you are using vision, how your culture has adapted to vision, and what areas of improvement are possible. This webinar explains the process of an Effectiveness Review, identifies the benefits you can expect from a review, and shares the gains made by clients who have completed an Effectiveness Review recently.

Watch it now!

Writing Effective Business Use Cases

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Writing use cases is an important part of any product development lifecycle. However, writing “good” use cases is not enough. Effective use cases are used as a basis for system and technical requirements, test plans, and user training.

In this webinar, we’ll provide tips that will enable you to write effective use cases based on current best practices. We’ll also show you how a properly written use case can easily be used in other phases of development. We will provide some tips for developing a process that will maximize the adoption of use cases and finish with a demonstration of how RAVEN can automate the use case writing process.

Who Should Attend?

Business analysts, consultants, project managers, and anyone who is responsible for gathering and writing business and user requirements.

Topics:
• Requirements development phases
• Current requirements development methodologies
• Role of requirements throughout the lifecycle
• What are use cases?
• Benefits of use cases
• Users and stakeholders
• Use case development
• Keys to developing effective use cases
• Components of a simple use case
• How do I get started?
• Alternates and exceptions
• Business requirements and non-functional requirements
• Use case review process
• Developing technical requirements from use cases
• Requirements and testing
• Developing user test plans from use cases

Watch it now!

Find Missing Requirements

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

The most common type of requirements problem, according to Gartner, is missing requirements. Incomplete requirements specifications often result in missed deadlines and rejection of applications at acceptance testing.

Improving communication with all stakeholders can dramatically reduce the number of missed requirements, improving quality and reducing overall time to market.

Attend this FREE webinar to learn more about finding missing requirements during elicitation sessions and during the requirements definition process, as well as solutions for accelerating the requirements development process. Learn how to:

- Identify the most common types of missed requirements
- Accelerate application time to market
- Link business and application development strategies
- Reduce rework costs
- Find missing requirements

This webinar includes a live demonstration of the award-winning RAVEN, winner of the 2009 JOLT Productivity Award!

Watch it now!

Accenture Extends Partnership with Ravenflow

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Ravenflow, the leader in Visual Requirements Definition™, today announced an extension of their partnership with Accenture. the world’s largest global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company.

“Our client needed to find a way to accelerate requirements validation without increasing staff,” said Susan Boers, president and CEO of Ravenflow. “They had invested in requirements analysis solutions, but had not seen the expected benefits in improving consultant efficiency, speed, and accuracy.”

“RAVEN addressed the client’s requirements challenges—in the first few days of using RAVEN, they received an immediate return on investment by reducing weeks of estimated work to a finished specification in just 1 day. We continue to see these dramatic savings time and time again.”

Using RAVEN, consultants and other team members rapidly visualize and validate requirements, build team consensus, and produce clear specifications of their business process workflows, business use cases, and business application needs. Based upon patented language processing technology, RAVEN allows business people to describe their needs in plain English, then automatically identifies missing requirements while generating visual process and use case diagrams that all stakeholders can understand. With its distinctive business orientation and process-based approach to requirements definition, RAVEN is uniquely suited for use on both enterprise process improvement and application development projects.

Business Rule Driven Requirements for Healthcare Companies

Friday, December 18th, 2009

A Seamless Transition from Business Requirements Through Implementation

Every few years, new technology makes an advance in capability that enables more efficient development processes. This webinar describes the ICONIX Business Modeling Roadmap — a process that combines two advances in tools capability to enable a quantum leap in development processes, automating time-consuming steps in business modeling and requirements elicitation, and eliminating errors in translation in the enforcement of business rules. The Business Modeling Roadmap enables business applications that provably meet their requirements to be built quickly and efficiently, while avoiding analysis paralysis.

You’ll learn:
•       How to identify business requirements using narrative business process scenarios and automatically generated activity diagrams
•       How to define business rules and automatically generate algorithmic code for their enforcement, without programming
•       How to identify software use cases for “automatable” business processes and drive these use cases forward all the way to code
•       How to model the problem domain, and why this is fundamentally important to all of the above steps
•       Lessons learned from a case study of a system redesign and implementation at a major healthcare company (anonymity requested to protect the guilty)

Presenter: Doug Rosenberg founded ICONIX in 1984 in order to apply best practices in analysis and architecture to real world software development. Doug has written five books on Software Engineering, most recently “Use Case Driven Object Modeling – Theory and Practice” and currently has two additional titles under development.

Watch it now!

Finding Missing Requirements with IBM Rational Requirements Composer

Monday, December 7th, 2009

IBM Rational, Ascendant, and Ravenflow invite you to learn about:

Finding Missing Requirements with IBM Rational Requirements Composer (RRC)

IBM RRC is the most talked about Requirements product of 2009. This webinar includes demonstrations of IBM RRC as well as Ravenflow’s RAVEN Visual Analyzer for RRC.

IBM Rational® Requirements Composer® is a requirements definition solution that enables organizations to enhance their requirements processes with easy-to-use elicitation and definition capabilities. Providing various visual and collaborative tools, Requirements Composer enables the capture and refinement of business needs into unambiguous requirements that drive improved quality, speed, and alignment across the IT lifecycle.

RAVEN Visual Analyzer is a plug-in component that adds powerful requirements visualization and analysis capabilities to IBM® Rational® Requirements Composer. Designed to work seamlessly with Composer, RAVEN Visual Analyzer helps optimize requirements elicitation and validation activities, saving time and improving overall requirements quality.

Watch it now!

Accenture Presents: Perfecting Requirements Definition and Management

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Featuring Accenture Partner Randy Vogel

The cost of rework, poor quality, and the associated delays in realizing return on investment continue to plague IT organizations.  Getting the requirements right is critical to solving these problems.

This webinar, drawing on years of practical experience at Accenture, will describe how applying standardized techniques and enabling users through tools and usage guidance helps reduce costs, increase quality, and deliver applications sooner.

Join this webinar to learn:
• Key requirements gathering techniques
• How requirements techniques can be used effectively together
• How an integrated set of tools can be used to automate and enable the techniques

Presenter: Randy Vogel

Randy Vogel is a Partner at Accenture with over 21 years of experience in IT and software development. Randy has been responsible for delivering applications across a broad spectrum of platforms and technologies using globally distributed development teams. Randy currently leads Accenture’s strategic tools program focused on standardizing the tools and processes used globally to deliver high-quality solutions to Accenture clients.

Watch it now!

Making the Business Case for RAVEN

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

How do you make a business case for bringing RAVEN into your organization?

Your gut tells you there should be a payoff to better requirements, but how do you quanitify what that is? Does the payoff come from:

- Analyst productivity?
- Less developer rework?
- Better testing?
- Catastrophes avoided?
- Better project outcomes?
- Faster delivery times?

In this 30-minute executive webinar, you’ll learn what customer case studies,  industry analysis, and expert opinion have to say about calculating the return on investment (ROI) from better requirements—and the answers may not be what you expect.

This webinar is designed for people who are considering the business case for investing in RAVEN.

Getting Started with RAVEN

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Join this webinar for a detailed demonstration and introductory training on RAVEN, recently named the JOLT Productivity Award winner for 2009. You’ll learn the basics of what RAVEN Express and RAVEN Professional are and when to use them.

RAVEN allows business analysts to produce clear specifications of their business process and application needs, including support for defining and documenting business workflows, uses cases, and functional requirements in Microsoft Word. Based upon patented technology, RAVEN is the only product that analyzes plain English text to automatically generate process descriptions, diagrams, and requirements specifications that both business and IT stakeholders can understand.

Learn:
* How BA’s and requirements managers across the world are getting twice as much done with better stakeholder buy-in
* How to create visual models of business processes and use cases from inside Microsoft Word
* How RAVEN Express and RAVEN Professional fit in the RAVEN product family
* The most useful tips and tricks for evaluating RAVEN

Please download and install the 30-day free trial version of RAVEN before attending this webinar.

Watch it now!