B2T Training

Introduction

• What is business analysis?
• Review the major tasks performed by the business analyst.
• Define the essential skills needed to perform their tasks.

1 hour

Project Participants and their Roles

• Identify project stakeholders and their roles.
• Discuss how the business analyst interacts with these participants.

1 hour

Elicitation Techniques

• Learn to use and determine the appropriate elicitation technique:
  • One-on-one interviews
  • Requirements workshops
  • Surveys
  • Brainstorming
  • Document analysis
  • Focus group
  • Job shadowing/observation
  • Competitive analysis
  • Interface analysis
  • Reverse engineering
• Learn to proactively plan interactions with stakeholders to make the most effective use of their time.

2.5 hours

Scoping the Project from the Business Analyst's Perspective

• Understand why the project is being done. Without this understanding it will be difficult for business analysts to elicit and document the right requirements and focus their business analysis work in the appropriate areas. Get an introduction to Enterprise Analysis.
• Understand the organizational environment. Identify the business stakeholders who will be involved in the project and how they will impact business analysis.
• Learn to ask probing questions about the requirements scope and facilitate a discussion with project stakeholders using visual representations of the requirements boundaries.
• Learn the context level dataflow diagram technique to identify and scope "what is" and, more importantly, "what is not" to be analyzed. Analyze interfaces with people, other organizations, existing systems, and other software applications.
• Discuss how a business analyst should collect, organize, and maintain requirements for efficient analysis and reuse on future projects. 
• Workshop - Scope the class case study project.
• Workshop - Reinforce the analysis techniques on a current project. Students will leave class with a draft visual representation of their current business area along with a list of follow up questions.

5 hours

Defining and Detailing Requirements

• What is a requirement? Why is it important to gather and document requirements? What are the criteria used to judge the quality of "excellent” requirements?
• Learn how software developers use requirements
• Understand the difference between analysis and design or "business" vs. "technological" requirements. Why is it necessary to understand the business problem before deciding on a solution?
• Learn the 5 core requirement components, what they describe, and why they are important.
• Entity
• Attribute
• Process (use case)
• External Agent (actor)
• Business Rule

4 hours

Requirements Analysis Techniques

• Learn the recommended approach to categorizing requirements. Why should requirements be categorized? Who uses each category? Why is it difficult to create distinct categories?
  • Business Requirements
  • Functional Requirements
  • Non-functional Requirements
  • Technical Requirements
• Learn the concept of traceability of requirements.
• Discuss the most commonly used analysis techniques to organize and refine requirements. Business analysts should have expertise in many analysis techniques to be able to adapt to different types of projects and businesses. 
  • Structured textual templates (process descriptions, data descriptions, business rules, use cases) 
  • Entity relationship diagram
  • Decomposition diagram
  • User stories, use case diagram and use case descriptions
  • Workflow diagram (UML, BPMN, ANSI, swim lane)
  • Prototyping
• Consider options and level of formality for packaging requirements and choosing the appropriate documentation techniques for each project.
• Review currently available software tools that can be used for requirements management.
• Workshop - Put into practice several of the analysis techniques on the course case study requirements. 

5 hours

Conducting a Requirements Review

• Learn how to conduct a requirements review: Who should participate? What are the required steps? How is a session conducted? What are the common challenges?
• Workshop - Review a sample requirements package.
  • Identify missing or incomplete requirements.
  • Identify potential test cases.
  • Document issues and develop an approach for going forward.

2 hours

Validate the Requirements

• Understand the role of business analysis in validating requirements and software testing.
• Introduction to software testing: Why is testing important? What is the business analyst's role in testing? What is the primary objective of testing? What are the phases and types of testing?
• Learn to verify that the business requirements are complete by identifying test cases.
• Practice identifyin test cases and refining requirements based on quality assurance principles.

2 hours

Analysis Communication Skills

• Learn the importance of building strong relationships with project stakeholders. How should business analysts communicate with users? How should business analysts communicate with the technical team?
• Improve your ability to develop in-depth, detailed questions for stakeholders by identifying the appropriate source of information, deciding on an approach, and using clear, consistent language.  
• Review selected analysis techniques to frame questions driving stakeholders to reveal core needs and problems. Ask the right questions through the use of interviewing templates developed specifically for business analysis.
• Recognize active listening as the most powerful elicitation communication skill, learn to listen for key phrases that reveal specific types of requirements.
• Improve listening skills by recognizing common barriers to listening, understanding verbal and nonverbal messages, acknowledging the message, and responding with appropriate feedback.
• Learn to effectively plan communications and facilitate groups to consensus.
• Workshop - Practice active listening and receive feedback from the instructors and other students.

2 hours

Working with Virtual Teams

• Understand what constitutes a virtual team.
• Learn about virtual team structures and terminology.
• Learn about technology requirements for virtual teams
  • Define Webinars, web conferencing, webcasting.
  • Understand the uses for collaboration tools.
• Consider business analysis process changes for virtual team work
  • Set policies for the team.
  • Utilize the Six Thinking Hats® technique.
• Effectively utilize the people on the virtual team 
  • Understand the critical success characteristics.
  • Tips for conducting virtual meetings successfully.
  • Choose the appropriate elicitation techniques for virtual teams.

2 hours

Course Summary

• Review Business Analysts tasks and skills.
• Workshop - Draft an initial Business Analysis Communications Plan for a CRM project.
• Develop an Action Plan with next steps on the student's current project.
• Student questions/discussion topics.

1.5 hours

Appendix - Overview of Application Development Methodologies

• Discuss various methodologies for application development.
• Learn which models are used in each methodology:
  • Waterfall
  • Information Engineering
  • IDEF
  • RAD
  • Iterative/Agile
  • BPMN 
  • Object Oriented - UML
  • Spiral/RUP

Optional