Kent J. McDonald

Beyond Requirements shows how to use business analysis practices and techniques to identify key business problems, find optimal solutions, and successfully implement them. Unlike most business analysis texts, it places analysis techniques in context, positioning them as a "means to the end" of solving organizational problems, not as an end in themselves. Kent McDonald helps you integrate analysis with ideas and techniques from other domains to significantly increase your effectiveness. He also covers crucial topics ignored by many business analysis books, including enterprise analysis, stakeholder analysis, and linkages to agile methodologies. If you're a business analyst, McDonald will help you transform your role and deepen your value to the organization. If you aren't an analyst, McDonald will empower you to leverage analytical techniques to solve your own business problems, and increase your own impact on the enterprise. Whatever your role, Beyond Requirements will help you clarify hidden risks and opportunities, collaborate and measure progress more effectively, provide better decision-making support, and formulate more successful strategy.

Analysis with an Agile Mindset

Beyond Requirements

Todd Little

Pollyanna Pixton

Niel Nickolaisen

Enhance Fundamental Value and Establish Competitive Advantage with Leadership Agility Whether you’re leading an organization, a team, or a project, Stand Back and Deliver gives you the agile leadership tools you’ll need to achieve breakthrough levels of performance. This book brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help you focus all your efforts where they matter most: delivering business value and building competitive advantage. You’ll first discover how to use the authors’ Purpose Alignment Model to make better up-front decisions about where to invest limited resources—and how to filter out activities that don’t drive market leadership. Next, you’ll learn how to collaborate in new ways that unleash your organization’s full talents for innovation. The authors offer the Context Leadership Model for understanding the unique challenges of any project, and they help you tailor your leadership approach to address them. You’ll find a full chapter on organizing information to promote more effective, value-driven decision-making. Finally, drawing on decades of experience working with great leaders, the authors focus on a critical issue you’ll face over and over again: knowing when to step up and lead, and when to stand back and let your team produce results. Coverage includes Effectively evaluating, planning, and implementing large system projects Reducing resistance to process improvements Bringing greater agility to the way you manage products, portfolios, and projects Identifying the tasks that don’t create enough value to be worth your time Developing the forms of collaboration that are crucial to sustaining innovation Mitigating project risks more effectively—especially those associated with complexity and uncertainty Refocusing all decision-making on delivering value to the organization and the marketplace Making decisions at the right time to leverage the best information without stifling progress

Accelerating Business Transformation

Stand Back and Deliver

Satisfy Stakeholders by Solving the Right Problems, in the Right Ways In Beyond Requirements , Kent J. McDonald shows how applying analysis techniques with an agile mindset can radically transform analysis from merely “gathering and documenting requirements” to an important activity teams use to build shared understanding. First, McDonald discusses the unique agile mindset, reviews the key principles underlying it, and shows how these principles link to effective analysis. Next, he puts these principles to work in four wide-ranging and thought-provoking case studies. Finally, he drills down on a full set of techniques for effective agile analysis, using examples to show how, why, and when they work. McDonald’s strategies will teach you how to understand stakeholders’ needs, identify the best solution for satisfying those needs, and build a shared understanding of your solution that persists throughout the product lifecycle. He also demonstrates how to iterate your analysis, taking advantage of what you learn throughout development, testing, and deployment so that you can continuously adapt, refine, and improve. Whether you’re an analysis practitioner or you perform analysis tasks as a developer, manager, or tester, McDonald’s techniques will help your team consistently find and deliver better solutions. Coverage includes Core concepts for analysis: needs/ solutions, outcome/output, discovery/delivery Adapting Lean Startup ideas for IT projects: customer delivery, build–measure–learn, and metrics Structuring decisions, recognizing differences between options and commitments, and overcoming cognitive biases Focusing on value: feature injection, minimum viable products, and minimum marketable features Understanding how analysis flows alongside your project’s lifecycle Analyzing users: mapping stakeholders, gauging commitment, and creating personas Understanding context: performing strategy (enterprise) analysis Clarifying needs: applying decision filters, assessing project opportunities, stating problems Investigating solutions: impact and story mapping, collaborative modeling, and acceptance criteria definition Kent J. McDonald uncovers better ways of delivering value. His experience includes work in business analysis, strategic planning, project management, and product development in the financial services, health insurance, performance marketing, human services, nonprofit, and automotive industries. He has a BS in industrial engineering from Iowa State University and an MBA from Kent State University. He is coauthor of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility (Addison-Wesley, 2009).

Kent J. McDonald

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