The major obstacle to effective communication is ambiguity, meaning using terms and phrases that different members of your target audience will interpret differently. If your project is using an Agile software development approach the project team will address ambiguity conversationally during the elaboration of the user story and we will deal with that in a later KnowledgeKnugget™. However, even in an agile scenario it can be beneficial to remove ambiguity earlier, for example, before you add the user story to the backlog to facilitate Sprint planning.

A business data model is one of the unsung heroes of business analysis techniques. Creating one for your project will help you avoid missing data late in the project when change is extensive and expensive.

Effective user stories are simple, well-expressed sentences that state one thing that the business needs, not how IT should develop it, and are relevant to the project. This KnowledgeKnugget™ explains what relevance is and how you can keep your user story relevant.

Since the birth of the Information Technology (IT) profession (and presumably even before that), developers (or builders of any kind) have been asking the business community (their customers) to tell them “what” they want, not “how” to develop it. Good user stories express what the stakeholder wants as the final outcome and avoids describing the technology necessary to produce it

There is a simple, “agile” approach to identifying “real” problems and creating well-expressed problem statements for your project charter. As a prerequisite, you need a list of potential “problems” that you can collect from all of your project stakeholders.

Although organizations initiate Information Technology (IT) projects to solve business problem or take advantage of a business opportunity, studies indicate the vast majority of projects target business problems. An effective business problem list can make the difference between project success and failure.

Stakeholder identification is one of the most critical steps in the early phases of any project. Missing a single stakeholder might endanger the entire project. Discovering missed stakeholders late in the project is a major contributing factor to scope creep.