Analyst’s corner digest #9
Top stories published in September 2022
Hi there!
Welcome to the new edition of Analyst’s corner digest where we share some of the great stories recently added to our corner.
Editor’s choice
If you have time for just one article, we recommend you read this.
5 Steps To Build the Perfect Persona, by Kevin Bendeler
You’ve likely heard the term user persona before, especially if you’ve worked in user experience design. User personas are a commonly used tool in UX design. At their core, personas are about creating products with a specific, not generic, user in mind. The usefulness of personas in defining and designing digital products has become more widely accepted in the last few years. Properly used, this tool can supercharge a designer’s work…
Top selection
1) 3 Ways To Get Out The Trap Of Solving Problems, by James Compton
Although Business Analysis is about helping the business solve their problems, there’s a dark side to this which often get’s us into trouble.
In this article we’ll explore 3 ways to get out the trap of being solution oriented up front to shift more into the problem and needs to get better requirements.
2) How to Calculate and Design IT Service Availability — Architecture techniques, by Shashi Sastry
A common problem we do not deal with the attention it deserves is the proper specification, design and estimation of IT services and systems availability. The result is the shockingly high number of outages of web portals, mobile applications, and many business support systems not exposed to the ordinary person.
This article lays down a systematic method to think about the availability of a business service and what underlies it.
3) The Art of Writing Good Documentation, by Pragati Sinha
Documentation is dead. It’s a big waste of time. It’s stale the moment it’s done. Nobody has the time to write it. Does anyone even read it?
All are good excuses for writing little to no documentation for your software projects. But that’s precisely what they are: excuses.
Because if good documentation “is a love letter you write to your future self”, then no documentation is a trap you set for your future self.
An Experiment with an AI
Have you seen what Kevin Bendeler did here? He used the same brief on “Why Products Fail?” and sent it to a human (himself) and to a blog writing AI bot and compared the outputs:
https://medium.com/analysts-corner/why-products-fail-2424d88dc6cc
A fascinating experiment, and a great article!
More Stories
- The Importance of Clean Data in the Quest To Deliver “Value”, by Pragati Sinha
There’s no denying that data is vital for businesses.
Data helps organizations better understand their customers, track progress against plan, and develop strategies for long-term success. But many organizations don’t realize that the quality of their data is just as important as the quantity. This is because inaccurate or outdated data can lead to many problems…
- What’s in your business analyst toolkit?, by Pushkar Anand
You got to have the basic tools and look for newer stuff to be ready for action. Let’s clarify one thing. Business analysts are not all about domain knowledge and soft skills. In this day and age, they have to be ready to get their hands dirty and dig out information and insights from wherever possible. That requires access and familiarity with lots of tools…
We hope you have enjoyed the reading! Contact us if you want to get your piece published.
Thanks folks!
