Archive for November, 2009

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!

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Posted in Agile Business Analysis | 47 Comments »

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.

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Posted in Agile Business Analysis | 5 Comments »

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!

Posted in Agile Business Analysis | 1 Comment »

The “True Universal Language”. When words just don’t cut-it….

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Chris Wong, Agile Strategist
Chris Wong, Agile Strategist

Designers in California, developers in Asia, India and Eastern Europe.  Multiple languages, multiple time zones – complex software development.  Sound familiar?  How do you manage communications and consistency – ensuring quality results?    Yep, I’m speaking to those of us who for a variety of reasons (economic mostly) have accepted the opportunity and challenge of leveraging outsourced resources to scale our ability to do more, for less.  For those who can relate, experience has shown that one of the best ways of optimizing our chances at success is to do the best we can to be comprehensive and clear as it relates to business requirements and design.  Clear requirements = comprehensive designs = less to communicate/discuss = better code = quality results (or best shot at it). (more…)

Posted in Agile Business Analysis | 2 Comments »

Effective Requirements Elicitation Techniques

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Elicitation is the unique discovery process of gathering early stakeholder concepts and ideas. Elicitation requires a special skill set to invoke the responses required to produce a quality business specification document. Whether your organization fits traditional, iterative, or agile development approaches, this webinar focuses on developing good facilitation skills.

In this webinar, we will discuss how to:

• Improve facilitation, elicitation, and validation techniques
• Overcome reluctance to lead/facilitate elicitation sessions
• Recognize and develop essential elicitation traits and skills that include:
◦ Curiosity
◦ Fearlessness
◦ Questioning mind
◦ Attention to detail

Who Should Attend?

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

Topics:

•Effective elicitation sessions
•Requirements definition process
•Critical elicitation skills
•Elicitation and validation preparation
•Elicitation techniques and pitfalls
•Gap analysis
•Scope/impact analysis
•Practice elicitation session
•Becoming proficient at elicitation/validation
•Reviewing results (web and documentation)

Watch it now!

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Posted in Requirements Techniques | 27 Comments »