Welcome to its-all-design.com, the website of UK-based freelance software delivery professional, Tony Heap.

I’ve been working in software delivery for a little while now – in a variety of roles, including product owner, business analyst, service designer, solution architect, agile coach and more. As a freelancer, I’ve had the opportunity to work for a number of clients on a variety of projects, both big and small. I feel like I have a few experiences to share – hence this site.

There seems to be a lot of advice out there on the interweb on being a business analyst. Everybody wants to tell you how best to do your job. And some of it is good advice. But all of it is merely opinion.

On this site I’m trying something a bit different. I can only speak from my experience, so I’m going to talk about just that: my experiences. You can take them or leave them, it’s up to you. Things that work for me might not work for you, so pick and choose.

I’m particularly interested in agile approaches and how they apply to business analysis. If you’re interested in agile, then you might want to know about how I became an agile business analyst.

I’m also a firm believer that there’s no such thing as a requirement – in my view, it’s all design.

Some time ago, I decided that I wasn’t actually a business analyst after all. I was a Business Analyst Designer. In order to better explain what this meant, I also published the Business Analyst Designer Method, an agile method for designing business and IT system change.

Things have changed since I wrote some of these articles. Back then, agile existed but wasn’t widely adopted, and there were lots of people calling themselves business analysts and trying to figure out where they fitted into this brave new world. These days, agile is pretty much the de facto standard. I’m more commonly a product owner, and we also have fancy new job titles like service designer, interaction designer and user researcher. Everything I learned as a business analyst is still useful to me as a ‘product person’.