About Active Requirements Ltd.
Active Requirements is my consultancy that specialises in understanding the role of business requirements in successful IT project delivery. My interests are lightweight governance, unambiguous business requirements, the synthesis of use case modelling and user stories and Scrum/iterative delivery in general. I am not an Agile purist, rather I am dedicated to finding ways of making different practices dovetail together to solve real world problems.
My approach differs from other people in the Agile community in that I believe in upfront requirements, this doesn't mean I value documentation over working code; not at all. It means that I believe the business of getting great user stories is a task that has been trivialised by the leading thinkers in the field. I believe there is a role for the Agile business analyst, and that role is neatly defined as being the 'master of story telling'. If we want the business to write the stories, somebody has to be available to edit and shape them.
I've worked in the business since 1997 for government and businesses large and small.
I hold a BSc in Computer Science, a PhD in Software Engineering and a DipM (Marketing). The topic of my PhD was the definition of a requirements pattern based approach to improvements in I.T. project delivery which I finished in 2005 at the University of East Anglia.
When I'm not doing this, I write short works of creative fiction, often set in the Middle East for some reason... :-)
Peter.