Howard Podeswa - Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning, The: From Strategic Plan to Continuous Value Delivery

There are three things Howard and I have in common: our passion for business analysis, our enthusiasm for painting, and our love of good food and conversation.

Several years ago, I worked at one of the largest banks in Canada as the center of excellence (CoE) lead for requirement management/business analysis. I held the responsibility for advancing the requirement management capabilities for the organizations IT & Operations unit, including the training curriculum for business analysis. It is there that I met Howard as we collaborated, mapping the banks business analysis competencies in the development of a new training curriculum for the banks business analysts. I was immediately impressed by Howards ability to understand what I was trying to achieve. He understood well the role of the business analyst and the knowledge and experience business analysts must have to be efficient in their position. His recommendations to augment the curriculums quality were to the point, and his willingness to collaborate and adjust his course offerings to fit my needs was essential to me.

We subsequently met several times, through formal business meetings, discussing how his courses were performing for us. These were also excellent opportunities to discuss how we could collaborate to advance the training curriculum further. I eventually moved to a different position. Howard and I stayed in contact. We met regularly on a casual basis, catching up, and often ran into each other at industry conferences where Howard presented.

We collaborated through the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA). I served in various capacities for fifteen years, initially as a volunteer in multiple roles, including chair of the board of directors. I also led the association as interim president and CEO in 20132014. I covered various roles and functions afterward, including director of business and corporate development, where I established multiple strategic alliances with other professional associations.

I established a formal relationship with the Agile Alliance. I negotiated with them a collaboration to develop the second edition of the Agile Extension to the BABOK Guide, v3.0, which successfully launched in August 2017. It is an excellent publication. The book tells you what you need to know about agile analysisit lays out the land, if you wish; it describes the concepts and techniques practitioners should know. Howard has mapped them all out for you in this publication plus many others. However, in my opinion, the real value this book provides, and the reason I dont hesitate telling you to invest in it, is the way Howard interlaces, using a running case study, dozens of scenario-based examples, tools, and techniques. Furthermore, Howard describes them all across the product development lifecycle and how they apply to the most common agile industry frameworks.

Over the last twenty-plus years in business analysis covering various functions, I saw firsthand how difficult it has been for many organizations to transition from a waterfall or some form of iterative development approach to agile. To my chagrin, I saw many organizations debating whether the role of the business analyst still had a place in an agile environment. I witnessed how challenging it has been for many seasoned business analysts to upskill their agile competencies to continue to bring value to their organization. There has been much progress since then, and business analysts have emerged as essential contributors to agile initiatives. Today, organizations with a high level of maturity in product development understand the critical importance that business analysts bring to their agile practices. But for many other organizations, there are still significant challenges as organizations try to fit bits and parcels of two or three agile frameworks to meet their internal processes and ways to manage projects. And this is where the real value of this book comes in. Howard has laid out more than 175 tools and techniques, examples, and guidelines that product owners and business analysis practitioners can readily apply.