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Introduction to Business Analysis Training: Defining Successful Projects

Course Outline

This Introduction to Business Analysis training course provides the essentials of the business analysis process, incorporating industry best practices from IIBA®, BCS, and Project Management. Through interactive workshops you will conduct a business needs analysis to elicit stakeholder requirements, apply business analysis techniques to identify key problems and potential opportunities in your enterprise and create effective requirements and communication plans. Improve your analytical competencies by analyzing and specifying requirements using industry best practices in this Introduction to Business Analysis course.

In this 3-day Introduction to Business Analysis course, you will learn how to apply a core business analysis framework through interactive workshops.

Introduction to Business Analysis Training: Defining Successful Projects Benefits

  • Perform external and internal analysis to understand the pressures on the business and root cause of a problem
  • Write clear requirements for formal and Agile projects
  • Create UML models and diagrams to analyze requirements
  • Perform strategy analysis to understand your organization's business landscape
  • Develop user stories and use cases

Introduction to Business Analysis Course Outline

Defining Business Analysis

Overview of the business analysis discipline

  • What is business analysis?
  • The scope of the business analyst’s work
  • Responsibilities of the business analyst

Introducing the business analysis process

  • From strategy analysis to requirements engineering
  • Best practices used throughout the business analysis process

Performing Strategic Analysis

Introducing strategy analysis

  • Identifying strategic context
  • Performing root cause analysis

Internal analysis

  • Responding to business challenges through internal analysis
  • Identifying your key stakeholders
  • Clarifying the organizational mission using MOST

External analysis

  • Optimizing organizational flexibility using external analysis
  • Investigating competitive pressures using Porter’s Five Forces
  • Analyzing the business landscape using PESTLE

Analyzing and Managing Your Stakeholders

Identifying your stakeholders

  • The stakeholder wheel and identification matrix
  • Creating stakeholder personas

Analyzing your stakeholders

  • Examining stakeholder impact for your project
  • Evaluating stakeholder attitude towards your project
  • Placing your stakeholder in the organizational hierarchy using STOP
  • Developing action-oriented business initiatives to address business needs and opportunities

Managing your stakeholders

  • Interacting with your stakeholders
  • Creating a stakeholder communication plan
  • Assessing your stakeholders

Defining the Solution

Exploring business and technical options

  • Forming scope from business goals and objectives
  • Writing the business requirements

Developing criteria and solutions

  • Making use of affinity diagrams to elicit high-level criteria
  • Comparing evaluation techniques

Making the Business Case

The structure of the business case

  • Creating a pyramid of information
  • Using customer-focused persuasion

Analyzing costs and benefits

  • Categories of costs and benefits
  • Identifying tangible and intangible costs and benefits
  • Investment appraisal using a cash flow forecast
  • Evaluating risk and impact

The Requirements Engineering Framework

Defining requirements

  • The cost of poor requirements
  • Distinguishing between functional and non-functional requirements
  • Key sources of requirements

Planning the requirements communication process

  • Addressing common pitfalls typically encountered during requirements development
  • Actors in the requirements engineering process
  • Dealing with tacit and explicit knowledge

Developing the requirements document

  • Building the requirements list
  • Applying requirements filters
  • Developing well-formed requirements

Establishing the Requirements

The elicitation process

  • Elicitation tools and techniques
  • Guidelines and checklists

Eliciting the requirements

  • Conducting effective interviews and workshops
  • Deploying observation techniques
  • Getting user feedback by using prototypes
  • Analyzing the situation using visualization techniques
  • Spotting non-functional requirements using quantitative analysis

Analyzing the Requirements

Organizing and prioritizing requirements

  • Arranging requirements by focus
  • Gap analysis techniques

Employing modeling techniques

  • Modeling the business context
  • Shaping the business processes
  • Inspecting the requirements

Writing the Requirements Documentation

Creating formal requirements documentation

  • Structuring a standard functional requirement
  • Structuring a standard non-functional requirement

Creating agile requirements documentation

  • Developing and splitting user stories
  • Crafting, and elaborating on, use cases

Validating the requirements

  • Stakeholders and their areas of concern
  • Types of validation

Managing the written requirements

  • Dealing with changing requirements
  • Sources of requirements change
  • Components of requirements management

Presenting the Business Solution

  • Delivering the requirements
  • Transferring the business solution
  • Supporting developmental activities
Course Dates - North America
Course Dates - Europe
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