Each guide covers one technique: what it brings, when to use it, how to run it and the mistakes most often made. Business analysis, project management, agile practice.
A roles and permissions matrix crosses a solution's functions with its roles to settle who may create, read, update, delete or approve.
A decision tree maps a repeatable decision's rules as branches read from root to leaf. When to use it, how to build it, the pitfalls.
Value modelling traces every solution decision back to the value it creates for a stakeholder named in the model: customer value = benefits minus costs.
Business visualizations make an analysis result readable for a stakeholder: choosing the form, setting the axis scale, writing the title as a sentence.
Impact Mapping links a quantified goal to the deliverables by naming the actors and the behaviour expected of each of them, on a one-page map kept up to date.
The Business Model Canvas describes on one page how an organisation creates, delivers and captures value: the nine blocks, when to use it, the pitfalls.
The internal rate of return (IRR) is the discount rate that zeros a project's NPV, compared against the hurdle rate to decide whether it is worth the investment.
Decision analysis: pick the right technique, from pro-versus-con analysis to force field analysis, then the decision matrix, AHP and multi-criteria analysis.
Decision modelling makes repeatable business decisions explicit: choose between a decision table, a decision tree and a decision requirements diagram.
The interview elicits in depth what one person holds. It needs a goal, an interview guide, a funnel of probes, consent and notes the interviewee has corrected.
Paper prototyping is a usability test: a real user operates an interface made of paper while one person plays the computer without saying a word.
A job story states a need through the situation that triggers it: when, I want to, so I can. Format, elements, pitfalls and the gap with the user story.
Observation elicits how work is really done: choose the active or passive stance by objective, measure without distorting it and stay clear of workplace …
A rough order of magnitude (ROM) is a single wide-band figure produced very early in a project to settle a go/no-go, before any detailed estimate.
Document analysis elicits information from the documents an organisation already holds: four triage criteria, a six-column chart and the gap as a finding.
Dot voting converges a workshop: each person places a fixed number of votes on the options and the count gives the short list. Rules, tie-breaks, pitfalls.
Data flow diagrams show where data comes from, what transforms it, where it rests and where it ends up, level by level.
Backlog refinement splits and details items until a team can finish them within one iteration: the refinement meeting, the readiness criteria, the cadence.
The kanban board caps work in progress column by column: a free slot below the WIP limit is the only signal authorising the team to start one more task.
Business simulation draws thousands of value sets inside uncertain ranges, runs them through a model and returns a distribution read in percentiles.
In card sorting, users group existing content themselves: the groups they form and the labels they give them are the basis of an information architecture.
Pro versus Con Analysis weighs a single go/no-go decision in two columns of arguments. When to use it, how to weight it and how to avoid false balance.
The data dictionary fixes the definition, the format and the permitted values of every data element and the rule that composes them into composite elements.
IDEF0 bounds a function on four sides: what it consumes, what governs it, what it produces, what performs it. IGOE turns it into a one-box scope diagram.
Estimation sizes the cost and effort of work still to come: the seven BABOK methods and how to pick the one that fits what you know.
A product roadmap states the direction a product is taking: themes, each carrying a measured outcome, set out on the successive periods of a timescale.
Non-functional requirements analysis turns each quality attribute into a measurable, verifiable threshold that replays as an acceptance criterion at test time.
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the smallest released version of a product that tests a hypothesis with real customers. The measurement decides what follows.
The single issue review is the review of one issue: a formal, prepared session convened to settle that issue or to check conformance to a standard.
Story decomposition: four levels from solution goals to acceptance criteria, worked breadth before depth, with splitting based on the value a customer can see.
Time boxing and budgeting prioritize requirements by fixing a resource first, time or budget, then adjusting scope to fit within the limit.
A desk check hands a completed work product to a single reviewer who did not write it: one answer the author handles alone, with nothing to reconcile.
Bullseye prioritisation works in a group: a goal at the centre, three rings, each item placed by its proximity. The narrow primary ring forces the trade-off.
Concept modelling organises the business vocabulary: the noun concepts, the verb concepts that connect them and the definitions.
The retrospective brings the whole team together at the end of each iteration to examine its process and settle on a few actions, each with a named owner.
Grouping sorts requirements into predefined priority bands. MoSCoW is its common form: four categories, effort balance and the pitfalls.
Portfolio Kanban places each strategic initiative in the column of the milestone reached, with a written exit criterion and a WIP limit per column.
The payback period measures how long an investment takes to pay for itself: the cumulative flows, interpolation in years and months and its blind spots.
Decision matrix explained: simple and weighted scoring, how to set the weights, run a sensitivity check and avoid false precision.
Process analysis examines an existing process to find its gaps, its waste and their causes before deciding what to improve.
Kano Analysis sorts a product's candidate features into threshold, performance, excitement or indifferent, from two opposite questions put to the customer.
Force field analysis weighs driving forces against restraining forces around a change, to judge whether it will hold and which resistance to lower.
The flowchart models a process as a sequence of steps and binary tests, in a symbol set where the shape of the box carries the meaning.
Business capability analysis maps what an organisation is able to do, scores each capability on a few agreed dimensions and ranks the investment decisions.
Interface analysis catalogues the exchanges that cross a solution's boundary and specifies the contract of each one: format, frequency, error behaviour.
ETL pulls data out of several source systems, transforms it according to the business rules and loads it into a single target repository built for analysis.
The Five Whys trace a problem back to its cause by chaining questions, down to a condition the organisation can fix, each link backed by evidence.
The onion diagram places each stakeholder in a ring by distance from the solution: who builds it, who lives with it, who surrounds it.
Kotter's change process leads a transformation through eight ordered stages, from establishing a sense of urgency to anchoring new practices in the culture.
Real Options sets the timing of a decision: every choice still open gets an expiry and a last responsible moment, the point at which the commitment is made.
A survey gathers structured responses at scale: response rate and margin of error decide whether the percentages hold up.
Benchmarking and market analysis: the two external studies BABOK v3 groups together, the test that decides which one to run and the way to combine them.
Total cost of ownership sums an asset's expenses across its whole life cycle, from acquisition to disposal, well beyond the sticker price.
Market analysis sizes the addressable demand, segments the buyers and maps the competition: a dossier of evidence for a strategic positioning decision.
In an informal walkthrough the author walks his draft through in front of a group and asks for feedback: the scribe's notes are all that comes out.
Root cause analysis: separating symptom from cause, verifying a candidate cause and choosing between the fishbone diagram and the Five Whys.
PESTLE analysis scans the external environment across six families of factors and delivers the register that feeds a SWOT's opportunities and threats.
The fishbone diagram maps the possible causes of a measured effect by category and hands over the candidates that data then has to settle.
Data mapping declares, attribute by attribute, which source data feeds which target data and under which rule, before any migration or integration.
Ranking orders items into a strict 1-to-N sequence against a single criterion: when to use it, how to run it, its pitfalls and a worked numeric example.
Inspection is the only one of BABOK's seven reviews whose definition carries a follow-up stage: it logs the defects and closes the loop on the rework.
The RACI matrix fixes who answers for each activity: the four letters, the single-A rule, the variants, the pitfalls and what it adds to a HERMES project.
Storyboarding lays a scenario out in ordered panels: the flow, the actors, the channels and the delays become inspectable before anything is built.
A focus group gathers the attitudes and the vocabulary of a segment: recruitment, a funnelled guide, moderation, analysis into themes and perspectives.
A business case justifies a change: the need, desired outcomes, alternatives assessed including do nothing and the recommended solution, with a costed example.
Relative estimation sizes the items of a backlog against one another, on a unitless scale of story points that velocity turns into iterations.
Story mapping arranges stories on two axes: the customer's path along the top, priority underneath. The map shows where the release line falls.
Parametric estimation prices a cost or effort by multiplying a measured quantity by a rate calibrated on history: the model, the calibration and its pitfalls.
The product differentiation statement fixes a product's target segment, category and competitive alternative in the six fields of Geoffrey Moore's template.
Objectives and key results (OKRs) pair a qualitative objective with three to five numeric key results, committed for a single cycle, then reset.
The lift chart and the cumulative gains chart rank a population by propensity and set how far down to contact: where the marginal decile stops paying.
Elicitation obtains information by three routes: interaction with stakeholders, study of existing sources and controlled test. How to choose.
A resource audit inventories what an organisation owns, in five categories, then tests each resource to say which of them can carry a competitive advantage.
Acceptance and evaluation criteria state the conditions under which a solution is accepted and the scales on which several candidates are compared.
The Ansoff Matrix crosses products and markets, existing or new, to name four growth directions and what each one forces the organisation to acquire.
Scope modelling draws the boundary of an initiative and decides what is in or out of scope before any work on requirements begins.
Value stream mapping lays bare, on a single page, how much of a flow's elapsed time is spent queueing rather than creating value.
Net present value (NPV) discounts an investment's cash flows and subtracts the outlay: a single CHF amount to decide by.
Data storytelling combines a quantified finding, its visual and the narrative of the business context, so that a validated analysis reaches those who decide.
The Johari window sorts into four areas what a person knows about themselves and what others know about them, then moves the boundaries through feedback.
Behaviour Driven Development states expected behaviour as given, when, then scenarios that the business can read and a tool runs unchanged as automated tests.
Benchmarking compares an organisation's performance against an external reference to turn the gap into a costed improvement target.
Functional decomposition splits a function, a process or an outcome into analysable parts, under two contracts: exhaustive children and a single parent.
The Balanced Scorecard turns a strategy into measurable objectives across four perspectives, linked to the financial result by a cause-and-effect chain.
Return on investment (ROI) sets net benefit against cost: a single, time-blind ratio for comparing options at a glance.
Goal The diagram specifies, formally, how a use case is carried out inside a system: the order of the actions, the conditions that route the flow, the simultaneous …
The decision requirements diagram (DRD) maps a complex business decision: sub-decisions, input data, business knowledge and the sources behind it.
Item tracking records every concern a stakeholder raises, gives it an owner, a due date and an agreed strategy, then carries it through to its closure.
Prioritization determines the relative importance of business analysis information: six approaches, the deciding factor in each and how to choose between them.
Descriptive and inferential statistics summarise a data set and estimate, from a sample, a population value together with its confidence interval.
A pass around puts one work product in front of several independent reviewers: it surfaces the disagreements, and the author reconciles them alone afterwards.
Evolutionary prototyping grows the prototype into the delivered solution: there is no discard event, so the quality floor is paid from increment zero.
Vendor assessment compares candidate suppliers on weighted criteria to ground a defensible sourcing decision.
Merise models data in three stages, the MCD, the MLD and the MPD, with a cardinality written at the opposite end from the one crow's foot and UML use.
Reviews: BABOK's seven types are chosen by fixing three settings, the objective, the participants and the formality, and the type reads off their intersection.
Hypothesis testing turns a business belief into a claim data can refute, fixes the decision rule before the data is seen and says what the result supports.
The Product Box is an elicitation game in which customers design the product's box, then sell it to the room and name the benefits that justify buying it.
CATWOE analysis tests a root definition against its six elements and brings out the rival worldviews that stakeholders hold about what a system is for.
Porter's Five Forces assesses an industry's profitability through rivalry, new entrants, substitutes and the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers.
Risk analysis and management catalogues an initiative's uncertainties, estimates their level and steers the responses through a risk register kept up to date.
In a formal walkthrough, each reviewer examines the work product alone, several days before a session that consolidates the findings and appraises the product.
The UML sequence diagram models the order of messages exchanged between the participants of a scenario. Notation, use and pitfalls for business analysis.
Backlog management holds the ordered list of remaining work: what gets onto it, how the detail concentrates at the top, how an item is selected for delivery.
Top-down estimation prices the whole by analogy to a past project, then splits it across components by ratio: the method, the steps and its pitfalls.
The growth-share matrix places a portfolio on two axes, market growth and relative market share, and reads off the cash role of every product from them.
Financial analysis weighs up the viability of a project: which measure answers which question and why an investment case has to combine several of them.
The Delphi method turns expert judgement into a single estimate through anonymous questionnaire rounds with controlled feedback that converge on a consensus.
The stakeholder list registers who is affected, in what capacity and with what authority: the attributes, the identification sweep, keeping it current.
Collaborative games surface a group's hidden assumptions: the game's three steps, the facilitator's role and how to choose the right game.
Use cases and scenarios: actors, goal levels, main flow, alternate and exception flows, UML include/extend notation and a Swiss worked example.
Problem shaping and reframing: refine a statement until it can be solved, then restate it in another context to open answers the first wording closed off.
Brainstorming opens a broad or diverse set of options: Osborn's four rules, the two-phase session and screening against criteria set before the session.
A/B testing measures a variant's real effect by splitting traffic at random between two versions, to decide on evidence which version to ship.
A glossary fixes a domain's terms and their agreed definition: one preferred term per concept, synonyms routed to it, colliding labels split apart.
Story elaboration: the just-in-time workshop that gives a story the detail, the examples and the acceptance criteria needed to deliver it.
A competency framework sets out, for a role, the competencies expected and their observable levels, then measures the gap for each person assessed against it.
The Purpose Alignment Model sorts a feature on two questions, differentiation and criticality; each quadrant carries its own investment decision.
Exploratory data analysis questions a dataset with no prior hypothesis, to establish in nine steps what can be modelled from it and what can be tested.
The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) weights criteria through pairwise comparisons and checks the consistency of the judgements. When and how to run it.
Prototyping turns on two independent axes: what becomes of the artefact and what someone does with it. The routing between the family's five techniques.
Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) design a monitoring-and-evaluation system: data collection, analysis, reporting and a baseline.
State modelling captures an entity's lifecycle: states, transitions, events and guards, initial and final pseudostates.
Negotiation-based prioritization reconciles divergent priority orderings into a single agreed order, with the recorded rationale for each trade-off.
The UML class diagram models an object-oriented domain: three-compartment classes, attributes, operations, associations and multiplicities.
A mind map (mind mapping) arranges ideas around a centre. With no standardised format per BABOK, its readability rests on Buzan's discipline.
Visioning states in one sentence the outcome expected from an initiative, who it matters to and the measures that show whether it is being approached.
BPMN models a collaboration between participants: a pool is a participant, only a message flow crosses its boundary and the model executes.
The iteration review shows stakeholders a working increment of the solution and turns their feedback into decisions carried into the next iteration's backlog.
An ad hoc review is a peer's glance at a fragment of a draft: a few minutes, one bounded question and a corrected work product as the only trace it leaves.
The Fishbowl lets a small inner circle talk while an outer circle observes and records: geometry, the open chair and harvesting hidden assumptions.
Simulation executes a model of the process with its rules and its data, then measures what comes out: validation, replications, intervals.
An affinity map groups dozens of scattered notes by resemblance and names the emerging themes, giving a group elicitation a readable structure.
A spike is a time-boxed piece of research that makes a backlog item estimable: a defined goal, a type, a duration fixed in advance, no delivery.
SWOT analysis maps strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, then cross-pairs them into TOWS strategies to frame a strategic decision.
Organizational modelling maps roles, responsibilities and reporting lines in an org chart and above all the informal lines of influence it never shows.
A user story captures a need, who, what and why, with its acceptance criteria: the agile format for carrying a requirement on a backlog.
Stakeholder analysis in five tools, one question each: list, matrix, onion diagram, personas, RACI. Which one answers yours and in what order to take them.
Process modelling maps how work flows. Choose the notation: flowchart, BPMN, UML or IDEF, by audience, formality and use.
The kick-off meeting opens a project: when to hold it, whom to invite, in what order to run it and what it has to leave behind on a single written page.
Data mining finds the patterns that improve a decision made at volume. The business analyst frames the question and the cost of being wrong.
What-if scenario analysis runs named conditions against the schedule network to see whether the promised finish date and the critical path survive them.
A planning workshop decides what a team will deliver over an agreed period: the what, then the how, at the three agile planning horizons.
Decision tables align a decision's rules in rows and columns: 2ⁿ completeness, consistency, don't-care collapse and DMN hit policies.
Technical visualizations test a model during the analysis: what the residual plot, the correlation matrix, the ROC curve and the silhouette plot show.
Data modelling describes the structure of information: entities, attributes, relationships and cardinality, at the conceptual, logical and physical levels.
The Kanban pull system authorises production through a signal from downstream: the empty bin returned by the consuming station orders the replenishment.
Business rules analysis makes every rule explicit, atomic and testable and lifts it out of the process and the code that enforce it.
SIPOC frames a process on one page, five columns from suppliers to customers, before any detailed analysis. Fast, shared scoping.
Optimisation computes the best decision under constraints: decision variables, objective function and limits gathered into a model that a solver solves.
Three-point estimation (PERT) draws an expected value and a confidence interval from three values per task: the formula, the variance and its pitfalls.
Personas are research-based user archetypes: how to build them, which attributes separate behaviours and which pitfalls await the finished persona card.
The stakeholder matrix positions every actor on power and interest and derives the engagement strategy: quadrants, method, pitfalls.
Lessons learned: the closing review yields a lesson only when speech stays honest, which blame-free facilitation makes possible.
The entity-relationship diagram (ERD) maps the structure of data: entities, attributes, identifiers and relationships annotated with cardinality.
Bottom-up estimation breaks a deliverable into work packages, prices each measurable leaf, then rolls the parts up into a traceable budget with a reserve.
Cost-benefit analysis computes the net benefit of an investment: the cash-flow table, identifying the costs and benefits, the pitfalls and a worked example.
A workshop brings key stakeholders into a framed, time-boxed session to produce a defined decision or deliverable, under a neutral facilitator with a scribe.
Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) makes the trade-off between options explicit: weight the criteria, score the options, aggregate and test the ranking.
Rolling wave estimation prices the imminent delivery in detail and holds the rest at a rough order of magnitude, re-estimated at the end of each delivery.
Throw-away prototyping builds an artefact in order to destroy it: zero residual value is the design goal, and that constraint buys the technique its speed.
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