Ted Hardy

Project Outlook

Good news for SMB Projects

This post originally appeared on September 29, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. I don’t know about you, but it feels like forever since we’ve had much good economic news. Even though this recession is finally, officially over, the number of lost jobs is just staggering. I don’t have

Managing Teams

The A-Team

This post originally appeared on September 27, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. Some things in life are just happy accidents. Sure, many of them include an element of hard work and determination, but having good things just fall into your lap doesn’t necessarily hurt, either. My first job out of

Salaries

Maslow and Money

This post originally appeared on September 24, 2010 on BetterProjects.net About six months prior to my promotion from tech support agent to business analyst, I remember looking around myself at all the other very smart techs in my department, all who had CS or business degrees, and thinking to

Ethics

Ethical Analysis

This post originally appeared on September 22, 2010 on BetterProjects.net The last few month’s I’ve been considering what area of business analysis is overlooked and, if I put a little effort into it, where I could possibly add a significant portion of information in the form of

Requirements Fail

My New Hero

This post originally appeared on September 17, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. Forget Batman or Superman, Carl Malamud is my new hero. This guy gets it. Time is in short supply for all of us, so if you skip forward to around the 5 minute mark, listen to him discuss the

Technology

Are We Encouraging Stupidity In Our Users?

This post originally appeared on September 15, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. Lets face it, if you read this blog its very likely that at least some part of your job involves software development and/or implementation projects. While the work project professionals do extends above and beyond applications, we spend

Requirements Documentation

Upping the Revision Number

This post originally appeared on September 13, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. A few days ago, a few more than I intended due to the sudden onset of an illness I am just now getting over, I asked the followers of this blog about how they went about increasing the revision

You Make The Call

COTS Selection (You Make The Call)

This is a two-part post which originally appeared on August 27 and on September 1, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. Part 1 Its time for yet another installment of our favorite game here at BetterProjects.net, You Make The Call! The rules are simple… we’ll present a situation that is

Project Phoenix, Something I Must Share

This post originally appeared on August 31, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. The first project with which I was ever involved which actually made it into production, was entitled Project Phoenix. This was at least the third try at filling this niche within my then employer, and there were probably many

Erasing your Project Identity

This post originally appeared on August 30, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently commented that at some point in the future, people may need a ‘reset button’ on their identity. The basic idea he had was that when we are young, we engage in activities that

Methodology

Thinking with Hats

This post originally appeared on August 25, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. I have seen every brainstorming and idea generation method under the sun… or at least that’s what I had thought until a meeting with my company’s R&D team a few weeks back. The subject of

People Management

Reviewing Project Team Members, part 2

This post originally appeared on August 20, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. In the first part of this series, I focused on things people managers can do to improve the review process for employees who spend most of their time working on projects. This second part will focus on getting down

People Management

Reviewing Project Team Members, part 1

This post originally appeared on August 18, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. Probably the worst review I have ever received started off by my boss of 18 months saying, “Wow, if I had known you were doing this caliber of work all this time, I would have given you a much

Efficient Project Markets

This post originally appeared on August 16, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. Back in college, I was a finance major. Despite having never once used all those hours of studying and research as a part of my career, the concepts themselves stuck with me all the years since graduation. One concept

Document Best If Implemented By The Date On The Cover

This post originally appeared on August 13, 2010 on BetterProjects.com. There is a great scene in the movie ‘Clerks’ where a woman is going through every single gallon jug of milk in the store, checking to see if which one has the expiration date that is the furthest out

Relationships

Project Misconceptions

This post originally appeared on August 9, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. We’ve all had that stakeholder or that developer or that analyst who had a single viewpoint on what they saw as the truth of a problem. No matter how much data you showed them, no matter how many

Is the Future in Insourcing?

This post originally appeared on August 6, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. Don Dodge is awesome. This guy really gets me to thinking. An article he posted to his blog today sparked a thought about what it might take for the ‘western world’ to bring back jobs that those of us

A Day In My Life

A Day In My Life

This blog post originally appeared on August 4, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. I’ve been thinking about doing a blog post for a while now that chronicles my day as a BA. Below you’ll see my timeline from when I got to work until the time I left. For

Requirements Fail

Are Requirements Really This Messed Up?

This post originally appeared on August 2, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. Call me skeptical, but I find it increasingly difficult to believe that ‘bad requirements’ are at the heart of so many failed projects. Over the last couple of decades, there have been numerous studies released that declare poor requirements

Heavy Thinking

This post originally appeared on July 30, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. I dislike giving out immediate answers when someone comes with me to help them solve a difficult problem. Sure, I can give you a quick answer which may or may not be the best possible answer, and possibly may

Project Theme Songs

This post originally appeared on July 28, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. Hi, I am your completely random post for the week. Two weekends ago, I was introduced to a new musical artist and became immediately enthralled by his work. I was a music major for my first two years in

Business Analysis

Making Sensible Decisions

This post originally appeared on July 26,2010 on BetterProjects.net. One of my early clients taught me how to not manage invoices in a company. This department’s policy was that if any customer’s submitted payment was more than $1 less than the amount on the original invoice,

Task Management

Task Management on your Desktop

This post originally appeared on July 23, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. There was yet another good post out of my news reader today that brought to my attention the following image: What I find so interesting about this is its simplicity as a task manager. There is no project plan

The Importance of Being a Failure

This post originally appeared on July 21, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. This video popped up in my news reader and I thought I would share it as an idea starter. When was the last time you failed? What lessons did you take away from that failure? What habits have you

Project Connoisseur

This post originally appeared on July 19, 2010 on BetterProjects.net. I love everything about wine. From the vineyard to the glass, the entire process simply fascinates me. I love talking about grape varieties, soil composition, weather patterns, oaked v/s steel, yeast, racking, bottling… the list just goes on