As BAs, one of our primary goals is to improve the productivity and effectiveness of the businesses we work in, yet many of us are using tools that are detrimental to our productivity and restrict our ability for effective information management, communication and stakeholder engagement.  This exacerbates communication problems and introduces significant risks into project delivery that contributes to the dire IT software project failure rates.

Typically we spend too much time on administration, rather than doing analysis. 

In this week's article David Gelperin offers his experiences in using a lightweight requirements management tool. A middle ground between using a word process or spreadsheet (easy) and a capable, but medium to heavyweight requirements management tool based on a database management system. David describes his experiences with a couple of outline procesor tools that result in easy and capable requirements management.

If you work in new product development or have participated in maintenance projects, then most likely you have used either the focus group or the brainstorming technique. In this week's article Linda Erzah of BAMentor provides a handy guide of when and how to use focus group or brainstorming techniques to achieve the results you are looking for.