Mar

31

BABOK 2 Public Review Begins

March 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment

BABOK version 2 is now available for download from the IIBA’s website. This document represents a complete draft of version 2 of the knowledge areas contained in the Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge. This draft is being made available to the business analysis community to gather feedback on the content and quality of this material in order that the IIBA™ may assess the current state of the draft and make decisions about which changes should be included in the final release of version 2.

The public review will be conducted between March 31, 2008 and May 15, 2008. We ask that members of the business analysis community or those with an interest in business analysis, whether or not they are members of the IIBA, provide the IIBA with feedback regarding the quality and content of this draft through the online survey. The survey will request that you provide us with a rating of the quality of each task, technique, and competency, and provide you with an opportunity to suggest additional tasks and techniques that might be missing from this draft. You may also provide feedback directly to bok@theiiba.org, although we regret that we will be unable to respond directly to such feedback.

Following the completion of the public review, the IIBA will conduct additional surveys to assess the importance of each task and technique to the business analysis community in order to make a final determination of the content that will be included in the final draft.

In conjunction with the public review, we are conducting practitioner and expert reviews which will provide us with additional qualitative feedback on the content and quality of this release. When all of the reviews are complete, we will begin revising the text of the BABOK to include the changes suggested by the community, with the final release of version 2 targeted for the third quarter of 2008. The CBAP™ exam will continue to be based on version 1.6 until the final release of version 2. Once version 2 is generally available, the IIBA will announce a date for conversion of the exam.

The IIBA would like to thank the many volunteers who have generously contributed their time and energy to this effort.

Kevin Brennan, CBAP
VP, Body of Knowledge

(For the record, I’m still posting at blog.theiiba.org; just putting this up for anyone who comes here).

Nov

26

Goodbye and Hello

November 26, 2007 | 2 Comments

I’m going to be shutting down BA Insight in the next few weeks. You can find me, as well as the rest of the IIBA’s leadership, at our new home: blog.theiiba.org. See you there!

Nov

11

BABOK 2.0 Framework

November 11, 2007 | 3 Comments

Well, I’m here in beautiful Downtown Disney, Anaheim, California, for several IIBA meetings and the World Congress of Business Analysts. Unfortunately, my luggage is apparently in Colorado.

Downtown Disney itself is lively but I’m still on EST and was up at 5:30 this morning to catch my plane, so I’m not really likely to enjoy it tonight. In the meantime, though, I want to share something with you: the BABOK 2 Framework.

It’ll be on the official IIBA site very soon as well (mostly because someone else has to upload it there) but for now, enjoy the advance preview.

Nov

9

Some Updates on the BABOK

November 9, 2007 | Leave a Comment

The BABOK 2.0 Framework (a 16-page overview of the structure and content of BABOK 2.0) is in layout and will be published on the IIBA’s website in the next few days. I’ll be sure to link to it here when it goes up. This document will be available to everyone (not just IIBA members) and should help to show where we’re going.

In the meantime, version 2 is well into development. Drafts of the tasks will be completed sometime in the next few weeks. The techniques will take a little longer, as there’s a lot more of them then there were in earlier editions. If everything goes perfectly the 2.0 draft will be made available in December. If it goes normally, expect to see it in January-February. I will likely be putting out a call in the next IIBA newsletter to find people to draft content for some of the techniques that we don’t have an author for yet (mostly ones requiring specific technical experience), so please keep an eye out for it.

Next week I’ll be at the World Congress of Business Analysts in Anaheim, CA.

Nov

7

Note to Self

November 7, 2007 | 3 Comments

I really need to introduce the term “opportunity cost” into the BA vocabulary.

Oct

25

What is Business Analysis?

October 25, 2007 | Leave a Comment

It’s almost ready for public release. In fact most of it has been done for some time now, as you may have noticed if you looked at the presentations. At this point it’s mostly a matter of a little editing and finalizing the list of techniques.

As part of this effort I’m working on the definition of business analysis. It’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds like. The biggest problem, quite honestly, is that I have 3 or 4 perfectly serviceable definitions handy and now I need to figure out how to balance the tradeoffs between them. As a concrete example, one proposed definition reads (in part):

Business analysis involves understanding and enhancing an organization’s business architecture.

In a real sense, that’s a very good definition of what a BA is–almost all BA work is focused on the kinds of things that are included in a business or enterprise architecture, and it does clearly distinguish between business analysis and some similar but not identical disciplines, like product management, which does very similar work in a different context. The problems, of course, are that this definition presupposes you know what a business architecture is and also will be taken by many to suggest that BAs are primarily strategically focused, rather than working on tactical initiatives (as most of us do).

Another element I want to maintain in the definition is an acknowledgment that the BA role involves balancing the competing requirements of a number of stakeholders against the strategic purpose of an initiative.

Oh, and I want to make it at most two sentences, preferably one.

Sep

29

It’s Been A Long Long Month

September 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment

My wife and I are finally settled into our new home and our anniversary is coming up tomorrow. In lieu of actual content here’s another presentation. It covers a lot of what may be in version 2.0 of the BABOK (I say may because our volunteers are actively working on it now and so this presentation isn’t a definitive overview). However, it should give you some insight into current work being performed by the IIBA.

The Business Analysis Profession

Sep

4

Solution Assessment and Validation KA

September 4, 2007 | Leave a Comment

The “1.7″ draft of the Solution Assessment and Validation KA is now available for download by IIBA members.

This content was completed after the creation of the CBAP exam and was not designed using the exam content as a reference. If you are studying for the exam you should continue to use version 1.6 as the basis for your study.

This KA does not reflect the changes made to the structure of the BABOK for version 2.0. We will be releasing an overview of those changes in the very near future. However, since this material has been reviewed by BA practitioners and since the existing content doesn’t provide a lot of detail in this KA, we felt that IIBA members who use the BABOK as a professional reference or for other purposes would benefit from having access to the draft.

Aug

31

Updates Coming Soon

August 31, 2007 | 2 Comments

The 2.0 framework document (which describes the revised structure of the BABOK, the purpose of each KA, the streamlined task structure, and the candidate techniques) is finally almost ready to see the light of day. I’ll be posting it here and on the IIBA site within the next week or at most two. This will be freely available.

We’re also going to be making available draft versions of the Solution Assessment and Validation and Fundamentals chapters (to be labeled version 1.7) of the BABOK. These will be available to IIBA members only. Since they weren’t finished at the time the CBAP exam was completed, those of you who are studying for certification can ignore them (the exam doesn’t reflect the content). However, we know that a lot of people use the BABOK as a job reference and we saw no reason not to let people see what’s there. We’re calling them “1.7″ because they have not been updated to match the 2.0 framework, but they’re also post-1.6.

Jul

26

Definition of a Requirement

July 26, 2007 | 3 Comments

I got asked the following question about the official definition of a requirement used by the IIBA (which is itself only a slight modification of the IEEE’s):

 A requirement is1:

  1. A condition or capability needed by a stakeholder2 to solve a problem or achieve an objective.
  2. A condition or capability that must be met or possessed by a system or system component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed documents.
  3. A documented representation of a condition or capability as in (1) or (2).

Can you explain the intent of #3 and how it differs from #1 AND #2?

In practical terms, it may help to think of it this way. When developers say “that’s not a requirement”, they generally mean it in the sense of #3—something that’s been placed in the requirements document that they’re working from. However, if the functionality is clearly needed to implement something in the requirements document, even if it’s not directly stated, it’s still a requirement in the sense of #2. If a stakeholder needs the solution to do something, even if it’s not even implied by the requirements document, it’s still a requirement in the sense of #1.


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