Just wanted to see how well this might work, or not.

Please excuse the dust.

I’ve realized for a while now that I needed to get my own site up and running again, but it’s something that tends to have to get done in my spare time. If you’ve stumbled across this, it means you got here before I finished getting it built.

Here’s the presentation for BABOK version 2 that I gave in San Diego. I plan to have a version with audio up for IIBA members later this week.

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Kevin Brennan, CBAP
VP, Body of Knowledge and VP, Membership Services

I’m working my way through the feedback we’ve received on the public draft of version 2. Before I get into anything else, I’d like to say thank you to all of the people who participated. We got a lot, and I mean a lot, of valuable comments and feedback that will make its way into the final version.

Some of the comments we got suggested that the BABOK should be structured very differently from the current draft. While we’re not ignoring those comments, and looking at ways the IIBA might be able to address those needs, I hope people will understand that version 2 is not going to undergo that kind of radical change. The Task/Technique structure has been there for years now and it serves some very specific purposes that we could not address otherwise. We’re going to add material to the introduction of the published version to help people understand why that structure is there and how to use it. I’m not sure that I want to spend a lot of space in the published version talking about why the BABOK doesn’t include certain material.

Fortunately, we have a blog.

So, on to the explanations. One common suggestion is that we should include more footnotes or a list of recommended references in the BABOK, so that is serves as more of a reading list. I certainly understand why people would want that kind of book, but the BABOK isn’t the right place for that kind of information. There are several reasons why not.

The most important reason is that the BABOK is not, at its core, an academic work. By that I mean that it does not draw its authority and correctness primarily from previously published works. I’m not suggesting for a moment that all those previous works on business analysis are now obsolete, or that they weren’t very important in establishing the field, or anything like that. What I am saying is that the primary source of the BABOK’s authority is that it was written, reviewed, and developed by practitioners in the field. The BABOK describes what business analysts actually do, not what any expert in the field or even the BABOK committee thinks they should do. Practice in the field takes precedence over expert recommendations every time, if the two come into conflict. Now, that’s not to suggest that we support bad practices–we all know that there are many things people actually do that aren’t very good ideas.

The second reason is that the practices described in the BABOK are "generally accepted"–in other words, in widespread use throughout the industry. Any idea that is generally accepted is fairly unlikely to have one definitive accepted source. Sure, many of these concepts have a known originator (Chen for ERDs, Jacobson for Use Cases, and so forth) but those ideas have been built on and modified by hundreds of people since they were first developed. Trying to tie it back to one and only one source is often impractical and probably undesirable.

Why undesirable? Well, keep in mind the primary goal of the BABOK. Our objective is to create a common definition and understanding of what business analysis is. But we don’t want that understanding and the field to be frozen in time. Our hope is that people will build on that understanding and develop new works that will enhance the profession.

And if we did include direct references, what then? As a practical matter, that listing would rapidly become thought of as a study guide for the certification exam, no matter how much we protested that it shouldn’t be. So what happens when those books go out of print (as many of the works referenced during the development of the BABOK are)? Does that mean that the IIBA needs to make sure everyone has access to those works? What about new books or books that we didn’t happen to read during development, but which are still valuable? And God help us, what about sources on the Internet? Given that the BABOK will soon move to a much-longer term update cycle (roughly every five years is the plan) including a reading list simply isn’t practical.

Finally, in all sincerity, it’s impossible to develop a single reading list that will be useful to all BAs. Does a BA who primarily develops requirements for in-house software applications need to read the same books as a BA who specializes in process analysis? In practice, everything out there right now only meets the needs of a portion of the business analysis profession. As BAs get a better understand of both their commonalities and their differences that may change to some extent, but right now there’s very little that I could recommend to every BA out there, and most of those wouldn’t be books that are generally considered business analysis books (Smart Choices, for example).

That’s not to say that the IIBA won’t develop this kind of material. We can certainly see the value in it. It’s just to say that the BABOK is not the right place for it to be kept and maintained.

Kevin Brennan, CBAP
VP, Body of Knowledge and VP, Membership Services

The Yahoo! Developer Network has released a large set of UI Design patterns which cover a lot of the common interaction problems you’ll find on web applications. They’ve also included a bunch of stencils for OmniGraffle and Visio for those of you who work with those tools. Very much worth checking out.

If you have some tools or templates that you think should be featured on this blog (or on the IIBA website) drop me a line and let us know about it.

Kevin Brennan, CBAP
VP, Body of Knowledge and VP, Membership Services