Archive for May, 2010

IT Evolution, Inc. has been helping Hopeworks, a Camden, NJ youth training program, prepare for the opening of new Hopeworks C.R.I.B. house, a facility which will house up to ten students at a time while they attend college.

Hopeworks enhances the lives of inner-city Camden youth by expanding their learning opportunities through technology training in state-of-the art computer applications: website design, geographic information services (GIS), computer networking and repair, and video.

To support the setup of the C.R.I.B. facility, IT Evolution contributed the design of the C.R.I.B facility wireless network and the planned integration of the C.R.I.B environment with the network and services available in the Homeworks main office next door. A multi-zone audio/video solution design was also developed to enable the C.R.I.B to utilize and distribute content from a single source to multiple rooms in the new building.

For more information about Hopeworks programs and business services, please visit them at http://www.hopeworks.org.

I have always felt that the one essential trait that lifts a business analyst above the level of pure methodology is curiosity. To get good requirements, you need to be very curious about your topics. I’m glad to see my belief echoed in a good article by Kupe Kupersmith on his blog at the Business Analyst Times. In his recent post, “You Need Desire to be a Desired BA,” Kupe asserts that natural curiosity is a part of everybody’s personality, and BAs who exploit it are better at eliciting requirements:

If you have the desire you will adapt your approach over time to do what is right for the customer. You’ll question practices that are done just because that is how you or others have been doing it for years. You will become persistent in trying to find out the root cause of the business opportunity or challenge to feed your natural curiosity.

Frankly, all of life seems richer if you face it with a natural sense of wonder at how things work and what they mean. Good requirements elicitation comes not just from the initial questions we prepare for our information sources. It emerges from our follow-up, from the first answer followed by more questions to work out details, understand meanings, trace consequences and implications. As a one-time journalist, I often equate requirements-gathering to a kind of investigative reporting, where you never accept the first answer as the whole answer.

A natural curiosity also feeds itself, acting as an inspiration to continuously learn, and to not assume that what is true on one day will remain true forever.