July 2nd, 2010
Whether documenting work procedures for a process improvement initiative or defining requirements for a new application project, drawing process diagrams from scratch has been the bane of many business users.
Visualizing business processes is the critical first step to understanding them, so they can be changed and optimized as required. But far too many business and process analysts struggle to create diagrams that clearly and accurately reflect the way their company works. Despite advancements in drawing tools like Visio, it often takes hours or even days to get the diagram right.
Attend this free webinar to learn how RAVEN Cloud automatically generates diagrams from written descriptions of the process so you don’t have to draw them. Learn how to:
· Write process narratives in plain English
· Use RAVEN to analyze and visualize the text
· Identify and correct any errors or process gaps
· Review and re-orient the diagram as you wish
· Download the diagram to your desktop
This webinar will include a live demonstration of RAVEN Cloud so you can see for yourself how to create visually stunning, error-free process diagrams in mere minutes.
Date: Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Time: 10 – 11 a.m. PDT
Register Now!
Posted in Ravenflow | No Comments »
July 2nd, 2010
Whether documenting work procedures for a process improvement initiative or defining requirements for a new application project, drawing process diagrams from scratch has been the bane of many business users.
Visualizing business processes is the critical first step to understanding them, so they can be changed and optimized as required. But far too many business and process analysts struggle to create diagrams that clearly and accurately reflect the way their company works. Despite advancements in drawing tools like Visio, it often takes hours or even days to get the diagram right.
Attend this free webinar to learn how RAVEN Cloud automatically generates diagrams from written descriptions of the process so you don’t have to draw them. Learn how to:
· Write process narratives in plain English
· Use RAVEN to analyze and visualize the text
· Identify and correct any errors or process gaps
· Review and re-orient the diagram as you wish
· Download the diagram to your desktop
This webinar will include a live demonstration of RAVEN Cloud so you can see for yourself how to create visually stunning, error-free process diagrams in mere minutes.
Date: Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Time: 10 – 11 a.m. PDT
Watch it now!
Posted in Ravenflow | No Comments »
June 29th, 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!
Date: Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Time: 10 – 11 a.m. PDT
Register Now!
Posted in Ravenflow | No Comments »
June 28th, 2010
Check out this Ravenflow-hosted webinar featuring Mary Gerush, Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc.
Mary spoke about the results of her two-year long journey researching requirements skills, best practices, processes, and tools. Mary spoke about how some of the latest trends, including Agile methodologies, Lean Software, and Software-as-a-Service, have changed the way organizations are defining and managing high quality software requirements in the pursuit of delivering better products.
Watch it now!
Posted in Ravenflow | 5 Comments »
June 22nd, 2010
Before the project team can successfully implement requirements, they need a clear understanding of the functional, non-functional and other key characteristics of those requirements. The elicitation phase of RAMP (Requirements Analysis and Management Process) describes the activities you perform to interact with stakeholders, to discover their essential product or application needs, and gain the understanding necessary to specify them in more complete detail. While the other activities discussed in this webinar series are important, eliciting and specifying the project requirements are the real heart of your work.
In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Plan requirements elicitation meetings with end users and stakeholders
• Facilitate requirements elicitation meetings with end users and stakeholders
• Interview end users and stakeholders to identify essential business needs
• Confirm the project goals, applicable processes, and required capabilities
• Gather requirements notes, capability details, and related information
The Ravenflow RAMP Methodology describes a business-driven, best practices approach to planning, eliciting, specifying, validating and managing requirements for maximum project success. Bringing together proven business process and use case analysis techniques, the methodology enables rapid definition of essential business requirements by modeling and analyzing the processes where the solution will be used. Required capabilities are mapped from their parent business processes, then broken down into increasing levels of detail until the entire project scope has been specified. This not only ensures the requirements fully reflect business needs, but contain the detail necessary for successful implementation by the development team.
Watch it now!
Tags: Elicitation, gather, interview, RAMP, raven, requirements
Posted in Ravenflow | 1 Comment »
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!
Posted in Agile Business Analysis, Ravenflow, Requirements Techniques | No Comments »
June 1st, 2010
Ravenflow today announced a new contest to see who can create business process diagrams the fastest.
“We’re finding that many business analysts struggle to complete error-free process diagrams quickly,” said Susan Boers, President and CEO of Ravenflow. “Our new RAVEN Cloud service improves a tedious and error prone task from taking hours or days to mere minutes. Now all business people can get stunning process flow diagrams without having to become drawing experts because RAVEN does the drawing for them. We are hopeful that the contest will help teach analysts a new fun way to perform their everyday tasks and give them additional confidence in producing an excellent work product.”
The contest kicks off for the summer months, and anyone can compete to win the $1000 Grand Prize. The winner will be selected September 15. To enter, users must submit a video of using RAVEN Cloud to document a business process and clock the time they did it in. Simply email videos to quickdraw@ravenflow.com. The Grand Prize winner will be selected on the complexity of the diagram, the time it took to create and draw the process in RAVEN Cloud, as well as creativity. Submissions become the property of Ravenflow. To help analysts get started, a sample submission is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIp-0×9ZS7E.
RAVEN Cloud is hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform and features a highly attractive, easy-to-use Web application interface based on Microsoft Silverlight. Based upon a patented language engine, RAVEN Cloud is the only natural language application that allows business people to describe their processes in plain English, and then automatically identify gaps and other errors while generating visual diagrams all stakeholders can understand.
The beta is free and available to everyone now at www.ravencloud.com.
Posted in Ravenflow | No Comments »
May 24th, 2010
The planning phase of RAMP (Requirements Analysis and Management Process) sets the stage for requirements work. You collect some initial information to help scope the effort, and then you develop a plan for eliciting, specifying, and verifying requirements with project stakeholders. In some companies, all of the requirements work is completed at the beginning of the project and signed off, following a traditional or modified waterfall approach. In other companies, requirements work is performed in a series of feature-driven iterations using lean or agile development methods. You do the same tasks with either approach. The difference is primarily in when you perform your requirements work, not how you perform it. In either case, you still need to do some amount of requirements planning at the beginning of the project.
In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Define the high-level goals and business requirements for the project
• Identify the application end users and other stakeholders for the project
• Identify business processes to be impacted or transformed in the project
• Define the end-user capabilities required for each process identified
• Determine business priorities and order capabilities to be implemented
The Ravenflow RAMP Methodology describes a business-driven, best practices approach to planning, eliciting, specifying, validating and managing requirements for maximum project success. Bringing together proven business process and use case analysis techniques, the methodology enables rapid definition of essential business requirements by modeling and analyzing the processes where the solution will be used. Required capabilities are mapped from their parent business processes, then broken down into increasing levels of detail until the entire project scope has been specified. This not only ensures the requirements fully reflect business needs, but contain the detail necessary for successful implementation by the development team.
Watch it now!
Posted in RAMP | 3 Comments »
May 20th, 2010
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!
Posted in Ravenflow | 4 Comments »
May 12th, 2010
How To Effectively Apply Use Cases in IBM Rational DOORS
Organizations are increasing their adoption of Use Cases for specifying Business Requirements. IBM Rational DOORS, the leading Requirements Management software, offers no intrinsic support for Use Cases. How do we bridge the gap between use case activities and formal requirements management?
Join us for this webinar to learn:
* What exactly are Use Cases and what are that advantages of using them?
* How to visualize Use Cases to increase requirements quality
* How Use Cases can influence stakeholder validation
* How to structure Use Cases for effective IBM Rational DOORS implementations
This webinar includes a demonstration of Ravenflow’s award-winning RAVEN software for visual requirements definition.
Watch it now!
Posted in Ravenflow | 1 Comment »
