Detailing Process and Business Rule Requirements

  • Course Length:
    4 days
  • PDUs:
    Earn 28 IIBA CDUs and PMI PDUs
  • Public Pricing:
    $2395
  • Onsite Pricing:
    We offer discount pricing for onsite groups. Please contact us to discuss your specific course requirements, group size, and available training dates.
  • Detailing Process and Business Rule Requirements: Self-guided study available for purchase.
    Detailing Process and Business Rule Requirements Study Guide

Understanding business process provides the foundational element of every business solution. This course focuses on the skills of elicitation and business analysis by defining the essential processes and business rules. The most effective approach to ensure business success is to understand the business environment and use this understanding to elicit and document business and functional requirements.

Students are taught proven techniques to identify and define the essential business processes within the scope of the project and then detail them into functional requirements. These techniques include AS IS and TO BE modeling, workflow modeling, functional decomposition diagrams, use cases, and prototypes. Students will learn how and when to effectively use these techniques at the appropriate level of detail for varying audiences. Business rule analysis is also a key skill presented in this course.

Business analysts are uniquely qualified to elicit and document process and business rule requirements because of their understanding of the business needs and the user’s work environment. Business analysts are expected to analyze and understand business problems and present solution recommendations to the business stakeholders. Business process modeling adds value to projects by ensuring the technology solution will meet the business needs. This course supports and expands on the techniques in the IIBA BABOK® Guide V2.0. Mentor-led workshops require students to practice the techniques as they learn. Students are encouraged to bring their own projects to class.

In this course students will learn to:

  • Understand and document the business environment using industry best practices.
  • Use provided templates to elicit and document processes and business rules.
  • Look beyond the current technology or procedures to discover the true nature of the business activity.
  • Ask the right questions to identify the core business processes and analyze the business rules that control or guide them.
  • Document functional requirements that specify how users will interact with the software and how the software will respond.
  • Deliver consistent, detailed use case descriptions.
  • Use several analysis techniques including the decomposition diagram, use case diagram, and workflow diagrams.
  • Look at the business area objectively after business requirements are documented and organized to present alternative design solutions that meet the customer needs.
  • Validate business processes against data requirements.
  • Consider usability when developing prototypes.

BA Certification Core ClassThis class is a part of the B2T Training Business Analyst Certification Program. For more information on the program, please see our Certification page.

Intended Audience

This course is designed for business analysts, systems analysts, and other project team members responsible for eliciting and documenting business requirements and designing functional requirements. Students are encouraged to bring examples of their requirements documents to the class for review and feedback. This course may also be appropriate for individuals who manage business analysts or those who work with the business requirements document and need a more in-depth understanding of the process and documentation.


Prerequisites

We recommend that students first attend our Essential Skills for Business Analysis class or have experience in project scope definition, eliciting requirements from subject matter experts, and understanding how business requirements fit into the entire systems development effort. We also recommend that students attend Detailing Business Data Requirements before attending this class.


Introduction

  • What are business requirements? Why are they important?
  • Review requirements categories and classifications.
  • What are the differences between business and functional requirements?
  • Review the 7 characteristics of “excellent” requirements.
  • Review the core requirements components.

1 hour

Identifying and Defining Essential Business Processes

  • Learn to identify essential business processes. An essential business process is a core requirement of the business area necessary to provide the right solution deliverable. Each business process must be clearly defined, consistently named, and completely decomposed.
  • Students are given a template to document this detailed information and learn to identify essential processes from a case study.
  • Learn to extract essential processes from real-world, detailed user description interview notes.
  • Learn to use the process template as both an interviewing and documentation tool. Capture metrics and key performance indicators for each process.
  • Learn to look for redundant or reusable processes.

3 hours

Process Analysis

  • Learn to organize essential business processes in a process outline and functional decomposition diagram.
  • Learn 3 major business process identification approaches and the situations in which each would work most effectively.
  • Students will use each approach to identify detailed processes from a case study.
    • Top down
    • Bottom up
    • Events (and tie events back to the scope model)

3 hours

Documenting Business Rules

  • Learn about types of business rules (structural and operative) and why each one should be documented.
  • Review data-related business rules as they are documented in an entity relationship diagram.
  • Learn to detail business rules that involve both data and process components.
  • Learn several techniques for documenting business rules.
  • Learn to extract business rules from different sources.

2.5 hours

Finalizing the Business Requirements

  • Learn to link the data and process elements to identify missing or incomplete requirements. Each essential process must use data, and each data element must be used by at least one essential process.
  • Learn how test cases can help solidify requirements.
  • Review a requirements completeness checklist.
  • Obtain approval signoffs from appropriate stakeholders.

2 hours

Translating Business Requirements to Functional Requirements

  • Define the solution scope model. Once the analysis is complete and the business requirements have been documented, the project team defines and allocates the solution components that will support each business process.
  • Learn a six-step approach to defining the design area scope:
    • Document the functional design and solution components of each process.
    • Document business priority.
    • Document technical priority and estimated cost.
    • Break project into phases.
    • Workshop: Create a scope model using a use case diagram:
      • Define actors involved with the application.
      • Identify actor interactions.
      • Learn multiple techniques to derive use cases from essential business processes.
    • Obtain signoff.

3.5 hours

Utilizing Workflow Analysis

  • Learn to create detailed process models in workflow diagrams using a number of techniques:
    • ANSI standard flowchart
    • Swimlane diagram
    • BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation)
    • UML activity diagram
  • Understand the benefits of each diagram to target each technique to a specific audience and need.
  • Document AS IS and TO BE scenarios with responsibilities, decision points, and metrics.

3 hours

Documenting System Functionality

  • Learn to identify use cases.
  • Outline each use case for a high-level understanding of broad behavior.
  • Identify primary path, alternate path, and exception paths.
  • Decompose large use cases into smaller sub-sets, identifying reusable use cases where possible.
  • Learn how and where to document system user messages.
  • Learn 8 steps for excellent use case generation.
  • Learn to create detailed use case descriptions.
  • Workshop: Learn to document detailed use case descriptions using the B2T template.

3 hours

Designing User Interfaces

  • Learn to use completed documentation to identify where prototypes are necessary.
  • Learn to document report requirements, including ad-hoc and predefined.
  • Create and document prototypes.
  • Learn to use provided templates to document field edits and screen functionality.
  • Review usability considerations.

2 hours

Documenting Non-Functional Requirements

  • Identify requirements not previously addressed by business, functional, or technical requirement categories:
    • Performance requirements
    • Security requirements
    • Quality requirements
  • Discuss the business analyst role in the documentation of these requirements.

1 hour

Workshop - Maintenance Case Study

  • Identify essential processes and build a decomposition diagram.
  • Determine the design area scope.
  • Write a use case description.
  • Document functional requirements for an online screen, report, and manual procedure.

3 hours

Course Summary

  • Review techniques appropriate for each project using real-world scenarios.
  • Pull it all together; review the complete steps to business analysis.

1 hour

Detailing Process and Business Rule Requirements
Course Length: 4 days
$2395

Oct 25 – Oct 28, 2010

Orlando, FLRegister

Feb 28 – Mar 3, 2011

Las Vegas, NVRegister

May 9 – May 12, 2011

Dallas, TXRegister