LeslieJ.net :: Leslie J. Morse

I blame it all on Giada de Laurentiis. One day, oh gosh – back in 2005 probably, I was watching the Food Network(r) and Everyday Italian was on.  She was making a recipe for a goat cheese dip that featured caramelized onions and dried mission figs reconstituted in sherry. I followed the recipe once and it was great, but I will be honest. It was too much work, and I had to search for dried mission figs for nearly an eternity until I found some.

So, I opted to cheat and replace the dried figs with a jar of fig preserves. It was great. That dip was my go-to appetizer to take to parties and to fix when people came over to hang out. Everyone loved it. To this day I still take it places and people always ask for the recipe. Even when I talk about it people ask for the recipe. In fact, I just sent it to a colleague today after having talked about the dip when I was telling the story of how I came up with my recipe for The Great Garlic Cook-off. The beautiful thing is that the recipe is about as easy as it comes.

Leslie’s Gooey Giada Inspired Goat Cheese Dip

Ingredients:
- One large onion, thinly sliced into half- moons
- 2 TBS EVOO (extra virign olive oil)
- 1 – 2 cloves minced garlic
- 1 TBS minced rosemary, fresh (or 1 TSP dried crushed)
- Approx. 1 LB Goat Cheese
- Approx. 1 cup fig preserves
- Sliced baguette or pita chips

Steps:
- Cook the onions, garlic, and rosemary in a large skillet over low heat for approx 1 hour until caramelized
- Pre-heat oven to 375
- Crumble goat cheese into bottom of a 9×9-ish sized baking dish
- Spread onions over top of goat cheese
- Spread fig preserves over top of onions
- Bake for approx 15 min until bubbly
- Serve with pita or baguette

And that’s sort of what started the whole thing. I pieced the rest of Potentially Pretentious Pork Tenderloin with Garlic 5 Ways based on the following…

One day I had left over goat cheese dip and a pork tenderloin, and I had recently watched the ‘Fit to be Tied‘ episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown makes roulades, so decided to make a roulade and stuff the pork tenderloin with the left over dip. It was seriously good eats. That got me closer to PPPT w/ G5W.

One evening I had dinner at Mr. Friendly’s in Columbia, SC and had an appetizer of fried grit cakes. They were served with a bowl of softened goat cheese and an entire head of roasted garlic. It was also seriously good.

Then one day, had to be post July 2008, I saw an episode of Food Network(r) Challenge where the Gilroy Garlic Festival was featured. I was intrigued. And one day randomly last year I decided to Google the festival and I decided I would come up with something to enter.  (According to link above it next airs on 7/23/2010 at 7:00PM – the day before this year’s cook-off.)

I pulled from those few encountered foods and other knowledge I have accumulated over the years in order to create my recipe and here we are… in just over a week I fly to California for this year’s Gilroy Garlic Festival Recipe Contest and Cook-off hoping that my recipe inspired by those three experiences. Try out the goat cheese dip. Its great. Use it as a topping for grilled chicken…that’s also good, or spread on a tortilla and popped under the broiler. Yummy stuff.

My head is full of business analysis topics and thoughts. However, Chris Gurney‘s post ‘How to Be Awesome at Being a BA‘ assisted in inspiring me for my first business analysis related writing. In his post he does a great job of hitting on key skills BAs need to have, and is also on the money when it comes to saying, “Chances are, if your career has landed you in the role of a business analyst, it was probably by accident.”

Disclaimers:

• I too am someone that accidentally ended up in the role of Business Analyst
• I too have had very little formal training on being a Business Analyst
• I am relatively new to being a team lead
• I have no training on how to interview people

Last fall the BA team I worked on had 5 people on it. Today we have 15 with another staring next week, 3 current positions open, and one more position slated to open in the next month. Over the past 3 months I have reviewed 60+ resumes, interviewed at least 25 people and selected 6 for placement on my team. That’s almost a full time job in and of itself.

Through this, I consistently wondered, where do I find awesome BAs? Granted, I am hiring all contract positing and considering I operate within a mammoth sized IT organization there are lots of processes and restrictions related recruiting. I am essentially limited to considering only resumes submitted by our strategic sourcing providers. Given that, perhaps the more appropriate question is… How do I identify an awesome BA?

Clearly BAs need to be analytical and detail oriented individuals that communicate well, but what I have found is that being detail oriented conflicts with communicating well. First off, if I am not an aggressive interviewer its tough to get a word in edgewise after the candidates start talking. I find myself wondering, do I ramble like this when I talk? Gosh, I certainly hope not. To me a good BA will get down there in the weeds and have the ability to tell you every single nitty-gritty detail about something, but a great BA can give you the elevator speech about requirements and effectively communicate whats important to the audience at hand. As a result, I’ve landed on one question that makes it or breaks it during an interview: Can you take a moment to describe for me your ideal process for gathering and documenting requirements?

What I don’t mean is…Tell me about the process you used to gather requirements on your last project. But 9 times out of 10 that’s the answer I get and I have to painfully ask leading questions in order to try and uncover what I am really looking to understand. There are lots of technical answers someone could give me, and in a moment I will outline for you a BABOK inspired response, but first – my answer.

I would say my preferred process for gathering requirements involves a handful of key steps:
- Review the scope of the project I am working on
- Gain a foundational understanding of current state (if it exists) and the organization so I know my sandbox
- Gather requirements using techniques best suited for the project
- Distill content from those meetings into clear and testable requirements
- Validate the accuracy of the requirements with stakeholders
- Verify that requirements are truly feasible and in the scope of the project with my PM and technical counterparts
- Prioritize requirements with stakeholders
- Present a comprehensive package of requirements to all stakeholders
- Obtain approval/sign-off on the requirements

It’s not that hard. The answer should take about a minute, and if you are less wordy than I am you can probably capture it in a distinct list of verbs. The BABOK Table of Contents is a great place to pick up on the keywords a BA needs to effectively answer this question.

• 2.1 Plan Business Analysis Approach
• 2.2 Conduct Stakeholder Analysis
• 3.1 Prepare for Elicitation
• 3.2 Conduct Elicitation Activity
• 3.3 Document Elicitation Results
• 3.4 Confirm Elicitation Results
• 4.1 Manage Solution Scope & Requirements
• 4.4 Prepare Requirements Package
• 4.5 Communicate Requirements
• 6.1 Prioritize Requirements
• 6.2 Organize Requirements
• 6.5 Verify Requirements
• 6.6 Validate Requirements

There are a wealth of techniques one can use to achieve these steps, but it all comes down to four must-haves in my mind:

1. Assess the Environment
2. Elicit Requirements
3. Organize Requirements
4. Validate/Verify Requirements

Interviewing has certainly given me appreciation for what it takes to find talent and when it comes time for me to interview for a position again I will certainly do a better job presenting my own skills. So please, do me and any other hiring manager a favor. Know how to answer this question, and if the person interviewing you doesn’t ask it and you have an open ended opportunity to summarize yourself – include this topic. You should look stellar.

Business Analyst by trade, collaborative entrepreneur at heart; I have over 10 years of experience in information technology and digital business strategy.  My diverse experience working in a start-up, small business, Fortune® 500 & Fortune® 50 organizations across a variety of industries partnered with my passion for high quality analysis and process optimization makes me well suited for assisting organization and individuals with embracing Agile. I am a constant student of the art of software development and have a firm believe that IT organizations are the undercurrent of any business and are the key for achieving success in an economy where technology investments and processes can cultivate or kill a company’s competitive advantage and  profitability.

My attention to detail, engaging personality, strategic insight & communication style allow me to work across all levels of an organization building rapport and driving engagement with individual contributors as well as executive leadership.

My Story
What you see is what you get – at least that is what I’ve been told…

I’m South Carolina born n’ bred and my blood runs garnet. If you would have asked me in high school “What do you want to be when you grow up?” IT Professionalwould not have been anywhere on the list.  The beauty of it is that I could not be a single bit happier with where I’ve ended up.

I attribute my journey into the IT profession to three distinct events.
1) Meeting a very talented graphic designer and front end developer.
2) Admission into the University of South Carolina Technology Incubator.
3) A generous investment from my grandmother.

While attending the Moore School of Business at The University of South Carolina I co-founded a web development company. We presented our business plan to the admission board for the University’s Technology Incubator program and received funding and assistance to get off the ground. Those early years fostered within me an extreme passion for small business and an intense curiosity about how IT solutions can be used to gain efficiencies within business processes and give entities a leg up on the competition.

After about two years we came to a crossroads – push the company to the next level (which would take some operating capital), or allow business to relax and  treat it as a hobby. As I already hinted, raising money was the choice we made and we went to the same place many entrepreneurs go – Friends, Family, and Fools. The investment in our young company from my grandmother was without a doubt the single most influential thing that catapulted me into a profession I love.

Needless to say, it was not a typical college career, but by the end we had managed to build a stable client base and found ourselves looking at an opportunity too good to be true. We had taken the money and invested it wisely, built strong relationships with people in the Columbia, SC IT community and ended up merging with a boutique data warehousing and software development company.

I spent a handful of years doing project management, business analysis, and general administrative work for GraySail LLC. While there, I gained an appreciation for the importance of proper requirements gathering, analysis, and solutions planning. Back then you could have asked me, “Leslie, do you ever see yourself working for a large company?” and you would have gotten a resounding, “No!”

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

After GraySail I did a brief stint in digital marketing strategy for SCANA, a utility conglomerate, and was fortunate enough to spend 3.5 years working at Lowe’s Home Improvement, a Fortune® 50 retailer, on their eCommerce team leading a team of 20+ BAs and doing analysis on enterprise level solutions. Corporate cultures have their positives and negatives and I would not give a day of work at Lowe’s back, however my roots are in small business and the entrepreneurial sprit took over in the later part of 2011 and I was again out on my own before joining the ranks of what I believe are the ‘Agile Elite’ at Davisbase Consulting where I am an Agile Coach & Trainer.

Life is More than Work
When I’m not swimming in the water of business analysis and agile…

• Cooking – I was fortunate enough (or some may say unfortunate enough) to spend a lot of my childhood in a restaurant with my father. As a result I really enjoying cooking and entertaining people and often have some sort of culinary adventure going on. The highlight being my selection as a finalist for the 2010 Great Garlic Cook-off at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, CA.
• Reading – You couldn’t pay me to read a book as a kid, but now I truly enjoy a good fiction novel and have even started a Book/Supper Club with a few friends. I’ve also been known to attempt broadening my horizons with some non-fiction novels even if lots of them are business related books, and of course spend time perusing blogs and articles online.
• Music – Shh, don’t tell but I was a band geek. More than a good marching band performance give me goose bumps though. Sometimes you just can’t beat the composition of 20th century symphonic band music with intricate woodwind lines and soaring brass melodies. I was on music scholarship in college and occasionally play bassoon with local community bands and orchestras.

If you didn’t catch my Facebook, Twitter or Posterous posts on the topic… I’ve been selected as one of the eight finalists for the 2010 Great Garlic Cook-off at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, CA.

That, in tandem with the kitchen remodel that is nearly done, I’m feeling the culinary spirit. It’s pretty refreshing. I’ve always enjoyed cooking and now with the idea of doing it in a competitive nature it has me motivated to read more about recipes and techniques as well as simply try new things.

Kitchen Before: From February 2009 when I saw it before I bought it.

Kitchen Almost After: Pretty much only painting and back-splash are left.

So this morning (in addition to getting this site back up and going) I’ve been researching some different recipes and options for Cilantro/Avocado Recipes. Why??

Well, after I discovered that I was in on the garlic festival, a very smart BA I work with suggested that I get people to host dinner parties where I practice my recipe. Brilliant if you ask me, what good is it that I can only cook the darn thing in my own kitchen. So, I’m on a culinary tour right now and at the first stop the other week I found a great group of ladies that love to laugh and love to eat. My garlic recipe was a huge hit, but they wanted more. So I have two culinary challenges on my hands. The first one (Cilantro/Avocado) is not worrying me. The second…’Peaches & Protein’ concerns me a little more.

For the Cilantro & Avocado challenge I’m planning:

- Appetizer: Cilantro-Lime Shrimp bites with Panko Fried Avocado & Cilantro-Lime Mayonnaise
- Salad: Avocado & Cilantro Salad with Lime Vinaigrette
- Entree: Grilled Chicken Tortilla Pizza with Roasted Veggies and Fresh Avocado

It’s time for me to head to the grocery store to get some supplies for testing. Full details of the challenge to come…

It might have been months in the making (OK, maybe years in the making), but I’ve finally had a face lift. For awhile I was nicknamed ‘Two Point Oh’ by my friends and co-workers. Now at least my Web presence is a little more ’2.0′. Goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress.  An unmentionable number of Thank Yous to Matt and Jesse for design and technical expertise. I could not have done it without them.

I’m loving the clean slate and fresh ideas I have. While I may reach back and re-purpose a few old posts – specifically in the areas of creative writing – there is lots floating around in my head and lots going on that I’m wanting to talk about.

So instead of ending the first post with a valediction, I shall say…

Hello!