A paper for BA practitioners on how to work effectively with stakeholders when analysing an enterprise, reasons to adopt modeling techniques and how to use them successfully.

This White Paper focuses on the ‘art and science’ of working effectively with business stakeholders during the analysis of an enterprise or when working on projects and how to get them to buy-in to modeling techniques rather than the reading of copious textual documents. I use the words ‘art and science’ mainly because of the natural complexity that arises when working with people.

Consider the complexities in parent/child, husband/wife, brother/sister and manager/subordinate relationships. In all cases, individuals no matter how young or old, how learned or not have their own thinking preferences around behaviour, opinions, habits, likes and dislikes, entertainment, sport and how they wish to apply their knowledge and wisdom to their jobs and life in general. Trying to harness these different feelings and views towards a common goal is difficult to say the least.

It becomes even more difficult in an organizational environment when you throw into the complexity pool hierarchical job titles, politics, favouritism, unclear job descriptions, unclear work measurements, different skill sets, rewards, ethics, different technologies and so on. Yet this is the situation BA practitioners constantly find themselves in when building the organization architecture domain views and especially when working on a project.

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