COURSE DESCRIPTION:
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 Business Analyst training course will give you hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques for identifying a project’s scope, developing and discovering requirements, user stories, 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 requirements 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 skills, 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 various types of requirements.
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I. The Business Analysis Profession
It's only in recent years that business analysis has begun to be recognized as a profession in 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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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Improving Requirements
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.
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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
- 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
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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.
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BABOK Essentials
- Requirements Gathering (Business, Functional and System);
- Methodologies: RUP and Agile;
- Project Scoping from the Business Analyst’s Perspective;
- Business analysis vs. project management;
- Communication plan between stakeholders: business users and developers (JRP, JAD);
- User Requirements hands on Training: How To Write User Requirements
- User Experience (UX) Design
- Introduction to Business Analysis Training: Defining Successful Projects Foundation
- Introduction to Business Process Improvement (BPI)
- Introduction to Modeling for Business Analysis Training Foundation
- Business Analyst Soft Skills Training Foundation
- Building an Effective Business Case
- The Strategic Role of the Business Analyst
- Key Financial Metrics for Business Case Analysis
- Creating Effective Stakeholder Engagement
- Tools: UML, Visio, JIRA, HP ALM
