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Mastering Business Analysis

Mastering Business Analysis

Dave Saboe, CBAP, PMP, CSM | Certified Business Analysis Professional | Agile Coach

Your key to advancing your career as a Business Analyst and beyond

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Top 10 Mastering Business Analysis Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Mastering Business Analysis episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Mastering Business Analysis for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Mastering Business Analysis episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Mastering Business Analysis - MBA227: The Minimum Viable Business

MBA227: The Minimum Viable Business

Mastering Business Analysis

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11/16/21 • 21 min

Ian Reynolds discusses how to discover the right solutions for your customers and then deliver them quickly. Show Notes

Many organizations, especially as people are trying to work in more Lean and Agile ways, work towards producing a minimum viable product (MVP) and move on after achieving it. These organizations aren’t thinking about the value that could be delivered after the MVP.

They believe that if they put a minimum viable products in our customer’s hands, they know whether or not it’s a great product. Instead, people need to be working towards a minimum viable business as opposed to the minimum viable product. You could put a great product out there, but if you haven’t designed it to solve for the customer’s ultimate needs by testing it and getting early feedback

and created a degree of stickiness in a business model that will help you retain and add clients, you have a problem.

You don’t necessarily have a business and you haven’t necessarily solved the problem. Over optimization towards what you believe to be a viable product is not necessarily that MvP. It’s a business model that’s going to have sustainability.

What’s Valuable to Customers

When you’re developing a product, the easiest person to fool is yourself. You may believe that you have a great product, but you need to test it to validate that belief. That could be as simple as using a survey to check the validity of your idea. Building a product (even a scaled-down version of a working product) is a very expensive way to test an idea.

If you build the product first and then try to go out in the market and then make the adjustments, you’re going to have to build it again.

Faster Delivery

There are two major inhibitors to speed to market. One is trying to do everything yourself. The desire to understand exactly how the product is built and have too much control over the process of building that product is not efficient.

When you’re building a product, it’s not reasonable to be so in the weeds that you’re concerned about using a specific technology or growing to an understanding of how everything works. When starting your business or starting your MVP, don’t try to have one person do everything. Have people that are specialized in their given fields and fractionally use their time.

The other big impact to speed to market is if you don’t have a needed skill set in house. Training that skill and building competency can take a long time. You don’t necessarily have to hire for it as that could be much more expensive than using an outside party.

Listen to the full episode to understand how to test and discover the right solution and how approaches such as DevOps can help accelerate both discovery and delivery.

YOUR HOMEWORK
First Tip: Look at what the biggest players in the market are doing in terms of their engineering culture and then figure out what is it that they’re doing efficiently that you can copy. Don’t try to invent things yourself or come up with a new process; figure out what they’re doing and just copy it.
Second Tip: Analyze the opportunity cost of doing something in-house versus using a third party by looking at what an outside party can do for you and what specialization they have. If they could solve the problem for you quickly, maybe they can do it much more cheaply.

IAN Reynolds

Ian is the Chief Solutions Architect at Zibtek and Head of Venture Partners at Golden Section Studios. In his role as Solutions Architect, Ian matches business needs to technical solutions that solves the customer’s problem.


Thank you for listening to the program

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes and other podcatchers.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

TrendingMBA227: The Minimum Viable Business

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Mastering Business Analysis - MBA226: The FOCCCUS Formula

MBA226: The FOCCCUS Formula

Mastering Business Analysis

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10/05/21 • 12 min

In this episode, we revisit Theory of Constraints, an approach to improving organizational performance by accelerating delivery. Author Clarke Ching shares his FOCCCUS Formula to address the system’s bottleneck. Show Notes

In every process or value delivery system, there’s one constraint (bottleneck) that limits the flow of value of the entire system. If you want to deliver faster, you must identify and address the bottleneck. To improve the flow of value, we can apply the Theory of Constraints, a process improvement methodology that focuses on addressing the bottleneck.

Eli Goldratt’s famous book, The Goal, introduced readers to the Theory of Constraints and how to apply Goldratt’s Five Focusing Steps to address your constraint. However, many people are unaware of or confused by the Five Focusing Steps.

In you’re confused about how to address the bottleneck in your process, you can use Clarke Ching’s FOCCCUS Formula instead. FOCCCUS is an acronym that stands for the steps you can take to address the constraint and improve the system.

FOCCCUS

The first step in the FOCCCUS Formula is “F” for find the bottleneck. You can’t improve the bottleneck if you don’t know where it is. To find the bottleneck, look for work piling up of long queues in front of a step in the process. Work typically builds up in front of the constraint.

Once you find the bottleneck, the next step is “O” for optimize. You want to optimize the bottleneck so that it can get work done faster. You can do this by making sure the work that goes to the bottleneck resource is ready (has everything they need) and the bottleneck is focused only on value added work.

After you optimize, the next step is collaborate. Collaboration helps the bottleneck deliver faster because non-bottleneck resources may be able to off-load work that the bottleneck is doing.

In addition to collaboration, you can apply the second “C”, which is coordinate. This step involves finding ways to coordinate activities of both bottleneck and non-bottleneck resources to optimize delivery. This can include rearranging process steps or changing the timing of certain pieces of work to smooth the flow.

The third “C” in the FOCCCUS Formula is curate. When you curate, you decide what to put in a limited amount of space. Essentially, you prioritize work to maximize the value that can be delivered.

The “U” in the FOCCCUS Formula stands for upgrade. This can mean buying faster equipment, holding training to improve skills associated with the constrained task, or hiring more people. Upgrading can be expensive and you should only upgrade after completing the other steps.

The final step is “S”, which stands for start again. The FOCCCUS Formula is a continuous process. After you complete each step, you should validate that the bottleneck hasn’t moved. If it has, continuing to the next step with the same bottleneck won’t improve the flow of value through the system.

Check each time to ensure that you know where the bottleneck is and start with the simplest, cheapest intervention.

Listen to the full episode to understand how to use the FOCCCUS Formula to improve your process and accelerate value delivery.


Clarke Ching

Clarke has been powered by the Theory of Constraints for over 20 years and Agile since 2003. He wrote Rolling Rocks Downhill (the Agile business novel that never mentions Agile) and The Bottleneck Rules (which was featured in The Guardian newspaper, and was briefly the #2 best-selling leadership book on Amazon.com, just behind Steven Covey).


Latest Episodes

  • MBA228: Software Development PearlsKarl Wiegers shares his lessons on requirements, project management, design, quality and more. Karl’s advice can make you significantly better at what you do. Show Notes Karl Wiegers started programming in 1970 and has collected 60 lessons he has learned in several areas of software development including requirements, design, project management, culture, teamwork, quality, and [...]
  • MBA227: The Minimum Viable BusinessIan Reynolds discusses how to discover the right solutions for your customers and then deliver them quickly.
  • MBALC: Elon Musk’s 5-Step Design ProcessIn this lightning cast, we explore the 5-step design process Elon Musk uses for SpaceX to i...

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Mastering Business Analysis - MBA228: Software Development Pearls

MBA228: Software Development Pearls

Mastering Business Analysis

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11/30/21 • 25 min

Karl Wiegers shares his lessons on requirements, project management, design, quality and more. Karl’s advice can make you significantly better at what you do.

Show Notes

Karl Wiegers started programming in 1970 and has collected 60 lessons he has learned in several areas of software development including requirements, design, project management, culture, teamwork, quality, and process improvement. Each of these lessons bring insights that can help you to and your organization to become significantly better at creating high quality, valuable solutions to your customers.

The Need to Iterate

Almost everything we do takes more than a single shot and design is a good example. The first lesson in the design category of Karl’s book is “design demands iteration”. There’s always more than one design solution for a software problem and seldom a single best solution.

The first design approach you come up with is unlikely to be the best option. A good rule of thumb is that you’re not done with design until you’ve created at least three designs, discard them, and take the best ideas from those three and build something better.

The same holds true for requirements. It will take a few iterations to get it right. These are cyclical things that you have to plan in your project management approach. You’re going to have to build in some reviews, get some feedback, prototype, and do some modeling to make sure we’re on the right track.

Icebergs are always larger than they first appear; that means that there’s going to be growth in the project. There’s going to be new information and new ideas that come along. You have to build in that growth and include contingency buffers into your plans. The bigger the project, the more unknowns and ambiguity and the more likely it is to change.

Understanding Stakeholders and Customers

Usage-centric development (as opposed to user-centric) is more likely to satisfy customer needs than product or feature-centered development. We shouldn’t care about features as much as you care about knowing what people need to do with the product. That’s the difference between the usage-centric approach and the product-centric approach.

That begins by understanding your stakeholders. Stakeholders are individuals, groups, or even systems who can shape or influence the direction of a project or who are affected by the project. To be successful, you need to identify your various user classes and identify who’s going to be the literal voice of the customer. Keep in mind that the customer isn’t always right, but they always have a point. Many times, the customer may ask for a solution, which may or may not be the right thing. To provide valuable solutions, we need to understand the underlying problem. If the solution they propose is the answer, what is the question?

Listen to the full episode for more lessons and advice on stakeholders, quality, applying what you’ve learned, and more.

YOUR HOMEWORK
Pick two areas you want to get better at and vow to spend some of your time on the project learning about those areas. Look for opportunities to apply that new learning on your project and perform in those areas better than you would have before your commitment to learn and develop your skill in that focus area.

Links Mentioned in this Episode


Karl Wiegers

Karl Wiegers is an independent consultant, author, speaker, and thought leader in the project community. His books on software requirements are considered required reading for Business Analysts and Project Managers. As a consultant and trainer, Karl has worked with more than 100 companies and government organizations of all types, helping them improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their software development activities.


Thank you for listening to the program

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

TrendingMBA228: Software Development Pearls

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Mastering Business Analysis - Lightning Cast: POWER Start for Your Meetings
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01/26/21 • 5 min

Stop the wasted time and money from ineffective meetings by giving your next meeting a POWER Start.

The post Lightning Cast: POWER Start for Your Meetings appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

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Mastering Business Analysis - MBA217: Objectives and Key Results

MBA217: Objectives and Key Results

Mastering Business Analysis

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02/04/21 • 22 min

Paul Niven helps us to understand Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a goal-setting tool to set ambitious goals with measurable results.

The post MBA217: Objectives and Key Results appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

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Mastering Business Analysis - MBALC: Elon Musk’s 5-Step Design Process
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10/26/21 • 4 min

In this lightning cast, we explore the 5-step design process Elon Musk uses for SpaceX to innovate and get better results.

Show Notes

In a recent interview, Elon Musk shared the 5-step design process he uses at Space X to achieve better results. Below are the details of this design process.

Step 1: Make your requirements less dumb.

Make sure you start with high quality requirements and that you truly understand the ‘why’ behind each. Simply using requirements because someone told you that’s what they want makes your requirements dumb.

“It does not matter who gave them to you. It’s particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough. Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone’s wrong some of the time.”

Elon recommends that for whatever requirement or constraint you have, it should come with a name, not a department. That’s because if there’s a question of concern, you can’t ask a department. You have to ask a person. The person who’s asking for the requirement or highlighting the constraint must agree that they will take responsibility for that requirement.

If you fail to do this, you may run into the situation where some random person who’s no longer with the company came up with the requirement off the top of their head with no foundation in a real need. That’s a dumb requirement.

Step 2: Delete the part or process

Look critically at the process or piece you’re developing and try to remove pieces instead of always adding new things. Work to understand the value that’s added by each part or each step in the process and reduce or eliminate those that don’t add value.

“If you’re not occasionally adding things back in, you are not deleting enough. The bias tends to be very strongly towards ‘Let’s add this part or process step in case we need it’. But you can basically make in-case arguments for so many things.”

Step 3: Simplify or optimize the design

Optimizing should only be done after you make your requirements less dumb and try to delete the part of process. The most common mistake you can make is to optimize something that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Step 4: Accelerate cycle time

We want to reduce the amount of time from when we start working on something to when we finish. The easiest way to do that is to focus on one thing at a time and eliminate task switching. With that focus, you can get things done more quickly . . . just make sure they’re the right things.

“You’re moving too slowly. Go faster, but don’t go faster until you work on the other three things first.”

Step 5: Automate

Once you’re confident you have the right requirements with the right ownership, removed unneeded steps, optimized the design, and done things quickly, you can automate the process. Don’t spend the time and effort to automate the wrong thing or automate too soon.

Using Elon Musk’s five-step design process may help you and your organization to innovate faster and focus on customer value.

Latest Episodes

Mastering Business Analysis - MBA126: Guiding Principles for the Business Analyst
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05/30/17 • 20 min

Author and consultant Steve Blais shares with us his 11 principles of the business analyst, which provides guidance as to what a business analyst should do to achieve success.

The post MBA126: Guiding Principles for the Business Analyst appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

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Mastering Business Analysis - MBA142: Lean Startup for the Enterprise

MBA142: Lean Startup for the Enterprise

Mastering Business Analysis

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11/14/17 • 11 min

Find out how to apply Lean Startup approaches so that you can build solutions customers will love.

The post MBA142: Lean Startup for the Enterprise appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

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Mastering Business Analysis - MBA159: Experiment Driven Development

MBA159: Experiment Driven Development

Mastering Business Analysis

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06/05/18 • 27 min

In this episode, you'll discover how to use hypotheses and experiments to identify the right solutions for customer needs.

The post MBA159: Experiment Driven Development appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

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Mastering Business Analysis - MBA031: UX – Are you Experienced?  Interview with Neil Turner
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08/04/15 • 26 min

In this episode, User Experience designer and researcher Neil Turner will share his thoughts on how and when to interact with UX professionals in your company as well as give you some practical tips and tools you can use to create a better experience for your customers. After listening to this episode, you will understand: What [...]

The post MBA031: UX – Are you Experienced? Interview with Neil Turner appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

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FAQ

How many episodes does Mastering Business Analysis have?

Mastering Business Analysis currently has 276 episodes available.

What topics does Mastering Business Analysis cover?

The podcast is about How To, Podcasts, Education, Business and Careers.

What is the most popular episode on Mastering Business Analysis?

The episode title 'MBA228: Software Development Pearls' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Mastering Business Analysis?

The average episode length on Mastering Business Analysis is 22 minutes.

How often are episodes of Mastering Business Analysis released?

Episodes of Mastering Business Analysis are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of Mastering Business Analysis?

The first episode of Mastering Business Analysis was released on Jan 25, 2015.

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