(Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash)
Hi, my name is Ann. I'm an ECBA certified business analyst with an MBA, a background in tech, and an incurable curiosity about how businesses actually work and sometimes why they don’t.
I created The Curious Business Analyst to study failure. Not the dramatic, headline grabbing version, but the quieter, structural kind. The kind that builds slowly through unclear requirements, unchallenged assumptions, misaligned stakeholders, and decisions that seemed reasonable at the time. Failure rarely comes out of nowhere. Most of the time, the warning signs were there. They just weren’t recognized, understood, or acted upon.
Curiosity is what makes that kind of analysis possible. It is what makes you stop and ask why something was done a certain way, who made that decision, what assumptions were in place, and what signals were missed along the way. It is what turns failure from a simple story into something you can actually learn from.
My background in business analysis and technology taught me that most failures are not caused by one bad decision or one incompetent person. They are caused by gaps. Gaps in understanding, gaps in communication, gaps in accountability, and gaps between how things were supposed to work and how they worked in reality.
This blog exists to explore those gaps.
Each report examines real business and project failures with a focus on root causes, decision making, and the underlying conditions that made the outcome possible. The goal is not to assign blame, but to understand what actually happened and what could have been done differently.
This site is for business analysts, project managers, technology professionals, and anyone who wants to understand how organizations succeed, struggle, and sometimes fail. Every failure leaves behind clues. This blog exists to follow them.