Course Description
Summary
A quick immersion course in all the key knowledge areas of Business Analysis.
Duration: 2 days (14 CDUs)
CDUs: 14
BABOK Compliance: Release 2
UML Compliance: 2.2
Supports: ITIL
IIBA Endorsed Curriculum
Description:
An intensive, practical course covering all aspects of the Business Analyst role – from requirements gathering to QA support. The emphasis of the course is on learning practical tools and techniques that can immediately be put to use in interactions with business stakeholders and the creation of subsequent requirements artifacts. All major tools and techniques –Structured Analysis, Object-Oriented (OO), Waterfall and Agile approaches – are addressed. The course supports the most up-to-date standards and guidelines in the industry, including the latest releases of the BABOK, ITIL and the UML.
The course is applicable to all those serving a Business Analysis (BA) function – whether as part of other duties or as a dedicated role: New BA practitioners gain hands-on experience in applying Business Analysis techniques, while more experienced BAs are able to upgrade their skills and learn how all of the techniques fit together. Trainees learn not only how to use the tools for new development, but how to use the resulting BA artifacts after they’ve been developed to create quality tests and as effective inputs for future Maintenance and Enhancement (M&E) projects.
Why:
Most large companies and organizations that rely heavily on software for business operations, employ Business Analysts to communicate business needs to software developers. When analysts do not do their job effectively, the result is incomplete or incorrect requirements – leading causes of spiraling development costs and project delays.
In the Crash Course, you’ll learn how to cut costs and delays by improving communication between business stakeholders and developers through comprehensive requirements analysis and documentation.
What makes this course stand out from the competition?
Value for money:
No course on the market offers this amount of content in so little time. How can we do this? By removing all of the “fat” traditionally found in BA courses.
Tool-focused: This course focuses on the tools and techniques used by the BA to perform the role. Unlike in other introductory courses, you won’t waste time learning generalities; you’ll actually learn how to use the key BA techniques so you can hit the ground running.
BABOK and PMI alignment:
Our course is aligned with the most current release of the BABOK and is approved for CDU credits towards IIBA’s CBAP certification.. Our course designer, Howard Podeswa was a reviewer for both the BABOK and PMI’s Business Analysis Practice Guide. His Business Analysis Handbook, on which this course is based, is a PMI-recommended study book for PMI-BA certification.
Trainees gain real hands-on experience using the tools during live interviews to discover requirements: We believe that BA tool are most effective when used upfront to structure effective interviews – rather than after the interview for documentation only. So we’ve designed our workshops so that trainees get practical experience facilitating requirements workshops while using the tools.
Integrated learning:
We use one integrated, case study, based on real systems, throughout the workshops so that trainees can learn trough experience how all the tools connect.
Experience: Our course is written and delivered by professionals with extensive practical experience in business analysis.
Audience:
- Entry-level IT Business Analysts and their managers
- Self-taught IT Business Analysts requiring a course that fills in the gaps and puts all the pieces together
- Systems Analysts and programmers interested in expanding their role into the business area.
Prerequisites:
Class Format:
- The course content is presented through an integrated case study based on a real-life system, lectures and hands-on group workshops. Each tool/technique in the BA skill-set is introduced by the instructor, focusing on the benefits of the tool and the context in which it is used with specific guidelines for its effective use in engaging stakeholders and documenting the resulting requirements.
Materials:
- Each trainee receives a hard copy of all course materials as well as a Job Aids booklet, containing useful templates, examples, guidelines and glossaries for use back on the job.
Objectives:
For the new BA:
- Gain hands-on experience in using essential business analysis tools in a realistic context, working with stakeholders in teams on an integrated case-study project
- Create requirements documentation that can be used as the basis for selection criteria for off-the-shelf software and IT services, customized 3rd party development and in-house development
- Articulate well-defined Problem Statements and be able to develop these into business and system requirements
- Learn when to most effectively use each technique and analysis model
For the experienced BA:
- Upgrade your tool usage to the latest standards and best practices (UML 2.x, BABOK 2, ITIL V3)
- Understand how all of the essential BA tools fit together over the course of a project in the performance of the BA role
Detailed objectives
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Understand the BA function, the different types of requirements and the process for developing high-level business goals into solution requirements
- Create well-defined Problem Statement
- Conduct effective requirements-workshop sessions with stakeholders for capturing and verifying requirements.
- Learn how and when to ask the right questions during requirements elicitation events.
- Create quality requirements documentation for an in-house or procured (external vendor) solution that is comprehensive, unambiguous and promotes consistency and reuse.
- Know when to use each technique and model
- Elicit and document user requirements with use cases.
- Understand the differences and similarities between use cases and user stories – and how both may be used to complement each other.
- Model business process workflow using activity diagrams with swimlanes.
- Be able to transition from the business context to IT solution requirements by examining workflow and using best-practice techniques for mapping process steps to system use cases.
- Capture detailed user requirements in system use-case specifications.
- Capture and document complex operative business rules using decision tables.
- Analyze the data dependencies between requirements using Structured Analysis Data Flow Diagram (DFD) models.
- Use Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) and UML Class Diagrams during interviews as effective tools for discovering structural business rules before development or procurement – so that they aren’t missed until they become expensive to implement.
- Support QA by reviewing and ensuring the quality of the test strategy, test scenarios and test data using Structured Testing and Structured Walkthroughs and by knowing how to use BA artifacts as input to test design.
- Understand how Test-Driven Development (TDD), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and boundary-value analysis impact the BA role.
- Understand the relationship between the BA and PM roles and how the BA supports the PM in managing and tracing requirements.
- Understand the implications of agile on the BA function.
Daily Schedule
Day 1:
Lesson 1: The BA Function and Requirements Elicitation
Lesson 2: Analyzing High-Level Business Process Impact with Business Use Cases
Lesson 3: Business Process Modeling
Lesson 4: Identifying Mid-Level User Requirements using the System Use-Case Model
Day 2
Lesson 5: Refining the Requirements
A: Analyzing Detailed User Requirements with System Use-Case Specifications
B: Analyzing Operative Business Rules with Decision Tables
Lesson 6: Documenting Process Requirements using Structured Analysis (DFDs)
Lesson 7: Analyzing Structural Business Rules Using Data Models and UML Class Diagrams
Lesson 8: BA Relationship to QA and PM Roles