Almost anyone who works in an industry that sells services will sooner or later be asked to create an estimate. Most people have limited skills in this area: they’re trained to perform some kind of specialist work like software development or report writing, while estimating is typically left to specialists. Where there are no specialists [...]
Posts tagged with "business analysis"
Requirements analysis kit for SharePoint 2010 collaboration site templates
In the course of my day job, I often find myself confronted with having to document things on paper that are easier to implement than document. One of these things is a SharePoint 2010 collaboration site template. As you know if you’re reading this, SharePoint has the ability to ‘wrap up’ the configuration settings, visual [...]
Mapping a meeting to achieve shared understanding
Have you ever had to facilitate a meeting where a large number of people was asked to solve a complex problem? It’s stressful and the outcome isn’t necessarily the resolution of the problem. Every time you think you’ve discovered a solution and apply it, the nature of the problem seems to shift. Depending on your [...]
Building your consulting library: the ethics and practice of knowledge reuse
The opinions in this blog post should not be construed as advice, especially not legal advice. Whether you act on anything I suggest here is entirely up to you—I would strongly suggest you take a close look at your employment or contracting agreement and/or take legal advice from someone qualified before you take any action [...]
Articulating business value
One of the hardest things in selling professional services is to properly articulate the business value of your solution in your proposal, especially during an economic downturn. We in the “Microsoft partner camp” are often not very good at establishing the business value of what we sell. It’s particularly challenging, of course, to explain how [...]
Addressing the SharePoint skills shortage, Part II: The SharePoint BA
The New Software Era I know this is a generalization, but I think that the world of software is finally changing. For years now, we’ve heard about systems that provide enough abstraction, enough of a “toolkit” user interface so that end users could configure their own specific application functionality. Truth is, these systems were always [...]
Addressing the SharePoint skills shortage, Part I: Job categories
There’s an industry-wide SharePoint skills shortage. Nobody can currently meet their human resource needs: customers, systems integrators, independent software vendors, even Microsoft itself is short of talent. Such is the plight caused by a product that has been unexpectedly successful, beyond Microsoft’s own wildest dreams. The product marketing team in Redmond has been on autopilot [...]
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About
Carsten Knoch
Software and services professional, attentive music listener, vision enabler, instigator, reader of books and the web, vegetarian, affordable audio hobbyist, thinker, writer, blogger, tinkerer, Internet dweller since 1992. Human being since 1970.
I blog about music, technology, business, vegetarian food, politics, culture and life.
More about me on the About page.
