Course Description
Full-Spectrum Business Analyst Training and Skills Development
Learn how to:
- Bridge the expectations gap between business stakeholders and technology solution providers
- Enhance business analysis techniques to reduce project cost
Implement practical methods for understanding user requirements
- Improve your requirements elicitation, development and documentation
- Understand and describe the business environment in which a project exists
- Explore proven tactics for managing project scope
- Focus on discovering root causes, not just symptoms
- Gain tools and techniques for developing more precise requirements
- Practice state-of-the-art business and system modeling techniques
- Organize and categorize project requirements
- Quickly identify accurate use cases for new or enhanced business systems
- Produce high-quality, readable use case documentation
- Avoid common use case traps and pitfalls
- Overcome real-world challenges that confront today’s Business Analysts
Immediate Benefits of Attending This Class:
- Learn how to help your business customers be clear about the current state of their business
- Understand and influence how business processes can be improved
- Improve project initiation by clarifying discussions of scope, increasing stakeholder involvement, and identifying exclusions and constraints up front
- Explore the Systems Development Life Cycle phases and the work to be done in each phase
- Help to bridge the gap between business customers and designers, developers, and testers
- Understand the organizational environment in which you are working and in which your project exists
- Use practical, real-world methods for initiating conversations with users to identify the business problem to be solved
- Discover tips and tricks that have helped other Business
- Analysts be successful with real-world projects
- Examine, review and refine requirements so they are specific, accurate and unambiguous
- Use effective practices for interviewing business customers to learn their requirements
- Learn the fundamentals of business process modeling for eliciting requirements
- Examine ways to discover and write business rules that affect a system
- Understand the importance of categorizing and prioritizing requirements
- Distinguish business and user requirements from solution requirements and know when it's appropriate to define and document each
- Manage project scope by identifying and managing changes to requirements throughout the project lifecycle.
- Learn how use cases fit into the life cycle
- Understand the relationship between use cases and requirements
- Translate users' statements of needed system behavior and functionality into high-quality use-cases
- Determine and document normal, alternate, and exception scenarios
- Overcome common pitfalls and traps encountered when using the use case approach
- Enhance relationships with stakeholders throughout your organization and improve your ability to satisfy stakeholders from both the business and the IT organizations
- Help your organization understand and apply state-of-the-art methods for discovering and documenting project requirements
- Better control project scope by identifying and gaining consensus on requirements throughout the project life cycle
- Reduce project costs and improve their quality by defining the right requirements the right way the first time, every time!
Complete 4 days of Business Analyst and Business Requirements training in one fast-paced Boot Camp - save time and money.
Develop Critical Business Analyst Skills
Business Analysts provide an essential function by assessing and analyzing the business environment, defining the scope of business problems, capturing project requirements, designing high-value solution approaches, and ensuring that the defined scope meets the customer's needs, goals, objectives, and expectations. This practical workshop will provide participants with fundamental analysis tools and techniques, including methods to understand the business environment, define a problem using a systematic approach, and influence and inform project stakeholders at all levels. You will gain pragmatic solutions to sustain stakeholder engagement throughout the project lifecycle, including questioning, listening, business need identification, problem solving, presentation, validation, and acceptance of the effective solution.
Analyze Business Problems and Identify Requirements for the Correct Solutions
Delays, cancellations and defects in systems development projects stem in large part from our inability to understand project requirements and the environment in which they exist, as well as our inability to communicate those requirements clearly enough to enlist the collaboration and commitment of all core project stakeholders. The accumulating evidence is unequivocal: most serious problems associated with projects are related directly to requirements.
Business Analyst Boot Camp solidifies the foundations of business analysis and equips business analysts with the critical thinking, analytical skills, and necessary people skills to attack the problem of project failures by addressing their root causes: incomplete, poorly defined, and/or changing requirements.
Practice Real-World Tools and Techniques for Immediate Application
This four-day course will give you hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques for identifying a project's scope, developing and discovering requirements and uses cases, and documenting them expertly. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises will provide you with the competence and confidence to improve project outcomes through better requirements elicitation and use case development. You'll gain a thorough understanding of the challenges faced in defining correct requirements, practical approaches for eliciting and documenting requirements, and strategies for managing requirements throughout the project life cycle. If you play a role in defining project scope, capturing requirements, or managing project scope, you can't afford to miss this course!
In Class Workshops and Group Exercises:
Practical and realistic hands-on exercises and activities allow you to refine and enhance your problem definition, communication and problem solving skills. Through group effort, you and your peers will discuss ways your department or company should be handling problems up front and how you can improve the early, critical stages of a project. You and your peers will identify and discuss strategies and tactics that your organization should be using to better define project scope, discover requirements, and document use cases. Specifically, you will:
- Evaluate the essential skills of a Business Analyst
- Explore and understand common differences in work and communication styles and how they affect interactions on a project
- Analyze the business environment in which your project occurs
- Practice project initiation techniques to clarify project scope
- Practice soliciting and validating information from project stakeholders
- Determine how best to present your findings to business stakeholders, and prepare for effective interactions
- Assess your individual and team communication effectiveness
- Learn to elicit and manage requirements from a realistic business case project
- Develop business model components such as a context diagram, activity diagram and use case model
- Work as a team to analyze business artifacts and documents to discover the functional requirements needed
- Learn to identify and extract important functional requirements from a process model
- Work as a team to establish appropriate level of detail in a use case
- Review requirements elicitation and use-case discovery methods
- Produce well written use case diagrams and narratives
- Understand how use cases are linked for large and/or complex systems
- Improve your ability to write high-quality statements of requirements
- Learn how use cases can improve your software testing and QA process
- Generate a plan for bringing these methods back to your organization
CEU:28 PMI PDUs
24.5 NASBA CPEs
28 IIBA CDUs
Substitution & Cancellation Policy:
You may cancel or reschedule up to 21 days prior to the start date of the class at no penalty. For any cancellation or reschedule requests within 21 days, the full course tuition is still due and not eligible for refund. Any paid tuition will be credited towards a future class and must be used within 12 months.
*Partner delivered courses may be subject to different cancellation terms
Agenda
It's only in recent years that business analysis has begun to be recognized as a profession it its own right. While people have been performing the Business Analyst role in organizations for several decades, differing definitions of the role abound. We'll start the workshop by exploring some of them, as well as gaining a clear understanding of where the industry appears to be heading and some emerging standards for the profession.
IIBA® and the BABOK®
What is Business Analysis?
Business and Solution Domains—how they relate
Key roles in requirements development in SDLC and Agile projects
The competencies of the Business Analyst
Distinguishing novice and expert Business Analysts
Effective communication
Six important BA skills
Practice sessions:
Business analysis definition
Competencies of a business analyst
II. The Business Case for Good Requirements
IT projects have especially high failure rates, and evidence points to problems with defining requirements as one primary cause. This section presents an overview of the challenges inherent in projects in general, and specific problems typically encountered with IT project requirements. We also examine some common terms and concepts in requirements engineering.
What is a good requirement?
Requirements attributes—who needs them?
Key practices that promote excellent requirements
The cost of requirements errors
Requirements engineering overview
Practice sessions:
Characteristics of good requirements
Explore the differences between requirements and design
Evaluate requirements for effectiveness
Factors to improve project success
III. Foundations of Requirements Development
In order to increase project success, we need to implement a repeatable, scalable strategy for effective business analysis. In this section, we'll explore a framework in which good business analysis occurs and we'll discuss ways to maximize project success using this framework.
Key terms in requirements development
A strategy for analyzing systems
Common requirement-classification schemes
The three levels of a system
Levels and types of requirements
The importance of traceability
Understanding the business context of projects
Practice sessions:
Define key terms
Use a framework to drive out requirements
Types of requirements
Classifying stakeholders' input
Evaluate a fictitious but realistic organization for project alignment
IV. Project Initiation: Eliciting High-level and Mid-level Requirements
What most people think of as business analysis is central to project initiation. Because of the depth of skill these activities require, most Business Analysts demand separate training to develop true mastery. This course module therefore provides an overview and introduction to crucial business analysis activities by demonstrating common tools for identifying and documenting project scope, for modeling current and desired states, and for stakeholder and persona identification. And because effective initiation can lay the foundation for effective use case or user story development, we'll introduce use cases and user stories by identifying them in this module, too. After we've elicited the high-level and mid-level requirements for our project, we want to check to be sure that what we have so far is a good description of the project's scope.
Understanding product vision and project scope
Identifying and describing project stakeholders and personas
Modeling the business
Analyzing the current state and defining the future state
Identifying systems and actors
Determining scope
Understanding and identifying use cases and user stories
Taking the Agile approach: writing user stories
Identifying and defining data
Documenting business rules
Finding quality attributes
Defining and documenting the project scope
Practice sessions:
Modeling the business
Brainstorming and affinity mapping
User stories
Context diagramming
Use case diagramming
Activity diagrams with swimlanes
High-level data definition
Entity relationship diagramming
Writing business rules and quality attributes
Evaluate a Scope Definition Document
V. Eliciting Detailed Requirements
Savvy business analysts and project team members have a variety of techniques for finding the detailed functional and non-functional requirements on their projects. This section introduces several of the most powerful and effective analysis techniques and discusses their use in requirements elicitation. As various techniques are covered, the workshop explores how to capture and document the requirements, including effective requirements analysis and traceability.
Overview of requirements-elicitation techniques
Decompose processes to lowest levels
Document analysis
Modeling processes to generate interview questions
Interviewing the stakeholders
Documenting the interview and resulting requirements
Adding detail to requirements we already have
Refining and rewriting for clarity
Practice sessions:
Elicitation techniques—advantages/disadvantages
Detailed process modeling
Generating good interview questions
Coping with challenging situations
Interview simulations
Writing new requirements and refining existing requirements
Roles and Permissions matrix, CRUD matrix, and CRUD functional requirements
VI. Improving Requirements Quality
After we've elicited the detailed requirements for our project, we want to analyze and refine the requirements. Writing requirements is one thing—writing "good" or "effective" requirements is another matter. As we are hearing and documenting requirements from our stakeholders, we should be evaluating them for effectiveness and refining/rewriting those that are not. In this section, we'll learn to derive maximum benefit from reviews throughout the life cycle. We'll then take a closer look at the issue of requirements quality, focusing on writing effective requirements through analysis, refinement, and review. Finally, we'll discuss how to document the scope of the project to minimize rework and scope creep.
Requirements quality
Common problems with requirements
Analyze for ambiguity
Requirements inspection, analysis, and improvement
Practice sessions:
Analyze and rewrite requirements
VII. Documenting Requirements with Use Cases and User Stories
Developing use cases is fairly straightforward, but someone actually has to document the use cases and requirements discovered during the requirements elicitation process. There is also an art to writing user stories and defining acceptance criteria for the requirements. This section of the workshop focuses on how to apply the knowledge you've gained so far to writing use cases and user stories. It also examines more complex aspects of uses cases, including sub-use cases and use-case linkages in larger systems.
Better user stories using the INVEST model
Defining acceptance criteria
Decomposition of user stories
Considering use cases for decomposing user stories
Use case basics
Ways to identify use cases
Use cases and requirements
Usage narrative
Anatomy of a fully dressed use case
Writing effective use case narratives
Understanding sub-use cases
Linking use cases for larger or more complex systems
Use case quality
Avoiding common traps and pitfalls
Practice sessions:
Write acceptance criteria and perform peer reviews
Decompose user stories
Write a usage narrative
Write a fully dressed use case and perform peer reviews
Check use case quality
VIII. Packaging and Presenting Requirements
Once we've worked with stakeholders to define their functional and non-functional requirements and to document, refine, and organize the requirements, we have to package those requirements into a specification. In addition, most systems also possess a significant number of requirements that aren't necessarily associated with specific business functions. These types of non-functional requirements must also be captured and documented as part of the complete requirement specification. This portion of the Boot Camp covers how to package the requirements into a specification that can be used for system development and testing.
Organizing and packaging requirements
Presenting requirements for review
Baselining the requirements
User story backlog management
Managing requirements changes
Getting to consensus and approval
Conducting formal and informal reviews
Documenting requirements in a Requirements Specification
Practice sessions:
Examine and evaluate a sample Requirements Specification
Discuss strategies for presenting requirements to stakeholders
Review how to determine impact analysis for changes to the requirements
Create a personal action plan for success
Audience
Anyone involved in business analysis would benefit from this class. This course is perfect for you if you are a(n)…
-Business customer, user or partner
-Business Analyst
-Business Systems Analyst
-Systems Analyst
-Project Manager or Team Leader
-Systems Architect or Designer
-IT Manager/Director
-Systems or Application Developer
-QA Professional
-Systems Tester
-Anyone wanting to enhance their business analysis skills