Podcast 2: Business Analysis Lifecycle
Thursday, May 6th, 2010
Our latest financial modeling podcast is now available on iTunes.
Click here to download Podcast 2 or stream it from the player at the bottom of the page.
Tom Grossman, Associate Professor of Business Analytics at the Universty of San Fransisco. Our conversation focused on the Business Analysis Lifecycle framwork that Tom contributed to developing.
This framework makes a very helpful distinction between the elements of business analysis that take place in the ‘real world’ and those that take place in the ‘model world’. Within the model world a key insight that we have found useful is between ‘conceptual modelling’ and ’spreadsheet engineering’. The FAST standard focuses on the spreadsheet engineering element; once the conceptual model has been developed, turning that into a well structured spreadsheet is little more than applying well documented rules of model engineering.
Tom makes a insightful statement during the podcast that when his students are struggling to make their model clear, more often than not it’s because they are struggling to make their thinking clear, that is, they do not have have a well formed conceptual model of the entity they are trying to analyse.
As you’re listening to this podcast, we recommend that you download this one page PDF of the Business Analysis Lifecycle framwork.
You can listen the podcast using the player below, or you can subscribe to receive it automatically every time we publish it on iTunes.
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This is a good podcast but I’m not sure I understand what ‘conceptual modeling’ actually is.
I am interested in the business modelling.
Carla – I’m working on a blog post & tutorial to give some guidance on conceptual modelling. I’ll post the link here when it’s up. Thanks for the feedback.