Beyond Requirements ─ Analysis With an Agile Mindset

Beyond Requirements shows how to use business analysis practices and techniques to identify key business problems, find optimal solutions, and successfully implement them. Unlike most business analysis texts, it places analysis techniques in context, positioning them as a "means to the end" of solving organizational problems, not as an end in themselves.

Kent McDonald helps you integrate analysis with ideas and techniques from other domains to significantly increase your effectiveness. He also covers crucial topics ignored by many business analysis books, including enterprise analysis, stakeholder analysis, and linkages to agile methodologies.

If you're a business analyst, McDonald will help you transform your role and deepen your value to the organization. If you aren't an analyst, McDonald will empower you to leverage analytical techniques to solve your own business problems, and increase your own impact on the enterprise. Whatever your role, Beyond Requirements will help you clarify hidden risks and opportunities, collaborate and measure progress more effectively, provide better decision-making support, and formulate more successful strategy.

Kent J. McDonald uncovers better ways of delivering value by doing it and helping others do it. His years of experience include work in business analysis, strategic planning, project management, and product development in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, performance marketing, human services, nonprofit, and automotive. He is active in the business analysis and agile software development communities helping people share stories about what does and does not work.

Kent has a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering from Iowa State University and an MBA from Kent State University.

Kent was also a coauthor of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility.