Feb
3
While I Wait for My Laptop…
February 3, 2006 |
…yes, it’s still undergoing repairs. A friend of mine “helped” by reminding me that all stories that begin with “I took my laptop in to be repaired” end in “I finally got it back after X number of months by going into the shop and yelling at them, and it’s never worked quit right since”.
Anyway.
One of my tasks right now is to bring some definition to the Underlying Fundamentals area of the BA BoK. Before I try to put together a committee, I first needed to define the approach and present it to the BoK Committee as a whole. This has been hampered by my inability to actually do any work or access my files. This is where the extended warranty is a mixed blessing…without it I’d have bought a replacement by now and be operational again.
So, I’m trying to recreate my work to pass along to the BA BoK Committee this weekend.
The first issue that has to be settled is how this section will be used. Unlike the other KAs, we don’t see this one as part of the definition of a BA. Rather, it represents the general knowledge a BA should have in order to make him or her effective in BA-specific tasks. This includes general business knowledge, communication skills, and so forth. That sounds all well and good, but how do we document and test it?
I’m working on the assumption that it will be a less detailed section than the other BA BoK KAs. For instance, Requirements Analysis and Documentation includes a list of analytical techniques and a brief definition of each technique. So for Use Cases, it defines what a use case is, describes the notation used in UML Use Case Diagrams, defines the common elements in a use case, and provides some basic guidelines for its use.
The PMBoK would have stopped at the definition of a use case.
I expect the Underlying Fundamentals to be more like the PMBoK in this regard. But the question is, how much? And how will we test on it? Will we assume you know this stuff and test on the specifics, or do we need to verify that BAs know the difference between various forms of organizational and project structures?