To Blog or To Book? That is the Question...

Hi!

Welcome to my “blog initiation”. My name is Jason Prine, PMP, Owner and Principal Business Analyst @ JPX2 Consulting Inc. (http://www.jpx2.com/), a full service Enterprise Business Analysis and Requirements Management consulting firm.

I have been working on a book for Business Analysts / Business Systems Analysts since about April 2006, but have only had time here and there to work out the outline and about 25% of the content. My working title for the book is “To BA or to BSA, Be Prepared with Questions”. If I was to compare it to any other book on the market, I would relate it to The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World, Second Edition (Expert's Voice); an excellent book with real world experience on dealing with the politics and behind the scenes “fun stuff” that makes IT work. Put this one on your “Must Read” list if you haven’t picked it up!

I’ve been working on this book for almost the past two years, in between my wife and I having a son (Nicholas; he’s a year old), starting my own consulting firm and working on other projects, while trying to maintain that “work / life” balance that we all strive for. My goal for this book is to be one of the first on the market to fill this obvious gap of books for Business Analysts / Business Systems Analysts and how to deal with the day to day. Check out Amazon; you’ll only find ONE book with Business Analyst in the Title: UML for the IT Business Analyst: A Practical Guide to Object-Oriented Requirements Gathering; another book that I highly recommend (I actually took the Business Object Oriented Modelling course from Nexient, not realizing that it was based upon this book).

I’m the kind of guy that loves to share knowledge and have discussions about my passions; Business Analysis being one of my key passions, outside of my family. I knew it would take me “forever” to complete a draft of this book, so that’s when I decided that I should take the bull by the horns and “start sharing” the knowledge. Hence the reason for this “blog”. I put blog in quotes, because I still view this project as a book, however, it is being created live for my readers, in an non-linear fashion. As the months roll on, I will be filling in the blanks for the outline that I’ve created for my book, using postings on this website.

“Why did you come up with the title / domain http://www.thebabook.com/? Isn’t that a little presumptuous of you to say the. Who made you the expert?” Great question and to be perfectly honest I am always upfront to state that I’m constantly learning and that no one can ever be the expert on any topic, as we all must be learning. I came up with the domain because I wanted something memorable and something that would speak to the fact that this is more than a blog; it’s a book in progress.

I look forward to publishing articles (or should I say sections of the book) for you to read. More importantly, I crave the conversation that we can build through this site about Business Analysis, Requirements Management, and “gonzo” type tools and techniques that we can all use in our day to day to make the job of the Business Analyst / Business Systems Analyst a little more well defined.

Cheers,

Jason Prine, PMP
Owner & Principal Business Analyst
JPX2 Consulting Inc.
"We make the implicit ... EXPLICIT."
Phone: 416-988-JPX2 (5792)
Email: jason@jpx2.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jpx2consulting
Web: http://www.jpx2.com