Business Analysis Agility Delivering Value, Not Just Software

Understand and Solve Your Customers’ Real Problems with Agile Business Analysis

To deliver real value, you must understand what your customers truly value, and solve the problems they really need solved. Business analysis can help you do this—and it’s as crucial in agile environments now as it always has been. In Business Analysis Agility, leading experts James Robertson and Suzanne Robertson show how to perform business analysis in an agile way: trying new things, adapting to changes and discoveries, staying flexible, and being quick. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience of hundreds of projects and organizations, the Robertsons help you prioritize relentlessly, focus investments on delivering value, and learn in ways that improve your results.

• Uncover the real customer problems hidden behind assumptions and conventional solutions
• Hypothesize potential solutions and quickly test them with safe-to-fail probes
• Understand how people, hardware, software, organizations, and other components come together in an optimal customer experience
• Write stories that help you find solutions that deliver more value to customers and the business
• Think about problems and projects in more agile, nimble, and open-minded ways

The Robertsons’ approach to analytical thinking will be valuable to anyone who wants to build better software in agile environments: analysts, developers, team leads, project managers, software architects, and other team members and stakeholders at all levels of experience.

James Robertson is a business analyst, problem solver, author, speaker, instructor, photographer, designer, and coach. He trained as an architect but left that for a career in IT and the sociological side of technology.

He left the security of employment in Australia to move and start his own company (with his brilliant wife) in the United Kingdom. Since then he has gone on to co-author seven books, numerous courses, and the Volere requirements techniques and templates, which have been adopted by organizations all over the world as their standard for gathering, discovering, communicating, tracing, and specifying solution needs.

James’ career is broad, both in a geographical sense and the areas and systems that he has worked with. It is fair to say that James has worked on almost every type of commercial IT project—from a start as a programmer in a software development house in Sydney, to consulting in New York, London, Rome, and most European capitals. He has earned his experience at the sharp end of both project and research work.

He divides his time between London and the French Alps. He skis for as much of the winter as demands on his time allow, and hikes all summer.

Suzanne Robertson is having a stellar career in information technology and systems engineering. She is a teacher, practitioner, writer, instructor, and guide.

Suzanne is a pioneer in adapting ideas from other domains for automated solutions. She has collaborated in workshops using experts from fields as diverse as modern music, visualization, and cookery. Ideas from these domains were adapted to make major breakthroughs in creative ideas for domains ranging from air traffic control to local government.

She is co-author of the best-selling Mastering the Requirements Process, among other books and courses. She is co-creator of the Volere requirements techniques. She was the founding editor of the Requirements Column in IEEE Software.

She has also made an impact in the socio-technical arena. This includes research and consulting on managing project sociology, both individually and as collaborative efforts between business, technology, and academia.

Her experience with different projects in both the private and public sectors has given her experience in a wide variety of systems and locations. She has worked in Europe, Australia, the Far East, and the United States.

Suzanne is a founder and principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild. Her other interests include opera, cooking, skiing, and finding out about curious things.

1. Agile Business Analysis
2. Do You Know What Your Customers Value?
3. Are You Solving the Right Problem?
4. Investigate the Solution Space
5. Designing the Future
6. Writing the Right Stories
7. Traditional Business Analysis
8. Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick
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