Month: August 2016

Simple ideas are the best – BA toolkit?

Today I stumbled across a blog post from a year ago where Ron Healy suggests creating a “Temporary Whiteboard” to carry about. The “whiteboard” is created by laminating a sheet of white paper! Sometimes simple ideas really are the best. You can’t get much simpler than that!

Ron suggests having parallel lines on one side which can be used for:

  • multifunction swimlane
  • activity diagram
  • sequence diagram
  • class diagram
  • hierarchical chart
  • system & subsystem diagram

This is such a good idea. As I commented on Ron’s blog – I’m a Business Analyst and I have been been using a daily plan made the same way for years and it didn’t occur to me to extend the idea.

Simple ideas - Laminated Daily Plans
Simple ideas – Laminated Daily Plans

I have two “plans” which I use which you can see in the picture. There is an A5 size one which is punched with two holes so I can have it at the front of an A4 ring binder and an A6 size one which I keep at the front of my Time Manager.

The layout of my plan is based on the forms I used to use in my Time Manager, but I like to remind myself of the “Elephant” and “Frog” tasks I am dealing with at the moment.

Once way in which I differ from Ron is that he uses dry wipe markers. On the other hand, I use a permanent marker and then wipe the plan down with alcohol at the end of the day when I am planning what to do the next day.

More simple ideas: What do you keep in your toolkit?

“Simple ideas” got me thinking about the Business Analysis or BA “toolkit” I carry around with me. For at least some of my working life I needed to use public transport, and that encourages you to carry the minimum you need.

My toolkit contains:

  • Laptop
  • Laminated plan
  • Diary
  • A4 ring binder to contain the current notes
  • Pack of Post-It notes
  • Pack of file cards
  • Foolscap or A4 wallet folder to hold loose bits together
  • A4 spiral bound notebook
  • Whiteboard Markers

What do you keep in your toolkit?

Re-planning: Path to Success or Mark of Failure?

Project Gantt Chart
Project Gantt Chart

When did you last revise your project plan? Did it make you feel you had failed, or did you feel it was an essential step on the path to success?

I would argue that re-planning is a necessary part of projects.

Re-planning: Just part of project life

I have met people who felt that “re-planning” or revising a project plan was an admission of defeat. They feel they should have anticipated everything in advance and built it into the original plan. I think they are being unnecessarily hard on themselves.

Unless you have complete foreknowledge about everything in and around your project, then some degree of re-planning is inevitable.

Re-planning to suit your project

To oversimplify things a little, there are two kinds of project, “Waterfall” and “Agile”.

  • With Waterfall, you can really only plan one phase at a time in any detail. That means that one of the concluding outputs from each phase is the detailed plan for the next phase. This means that you have to revisit the plan with each new phase. It’s an essential part of the method.
  • With Agile, you plan each iteration or sprint as it comes up. Again, this means planning again and again. The plans may be smaller, because the steps are smaller but they are still there.

In both cases the smaller plans fit within a larger, coarser grained project plan.

How up to date is your plan?

One of the advantages of re-planning or revising your plan is that it allows you to take what you have learned from your project into account. It means that the projections in you plan are more likely to be accurate and therefore you can take action to try to achieve them. Having an out of date plan which contains unachievable completion dates is demotivating. Bring your plan up to date and then manage to the up-to-date plan!