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Overview of Business Analysis

  • Course Length:
    0.5 days
  • Public Pricing:
    No public classes currently scheduled.
  • Onsite Pricing:
    We offer discount pricing for onsite groups. Please contact us to discuss your specific course requirements, group size, and available training dates.

This seminar presents the business analyst role to managers and others who lead and work with business analysts. In order for the business analyst to be successful, both the IT and business community must embrace the business analysis process. The seminar can be used as a working session to discuss how your organization will implement the business analysis process and approaches for documenting the requirements.

Both large and small organizations are realizing the benefits of using Business Analysts on all of their application development projects. A business analyst acts as a liaison between business people who have a business problem and technology people who know how to create automated solutions. Improving the communication between your business areas and your IT team significantly increases the quality of the systems developed.

A business analyst’s main responsibility is to elicit, analyze, and communicate requirements in a format that is useful to their business stakeholders and the technical developers. Analysis is a very important and time-consuming phase of every project. Business analysts need strong leadership as they elicit, analyze, and communicate requirements that are often unclear, inconsistent, and expensive. Business Analysts work most effectively when they have clear direction and frequent reviews of progress.

Intended Audience

This seminar is a management overview of business analysis for managers, supervisors, and project managers who work with business analysts.

Prerequisites

None

Introduction

  • What is a business analyst? What is business analysis?
  • Review the major tasks performed by the business analyst.
  • Define the essential skills needed to perform their tasks.
  • What is a requirement? How are they categorized?
  • Identify other project participants and their roles.
  • Discuss how the business analyst interacts with these participants.
  • The PM/BA partnership.

.5 hours

Defining and Managing Requirements Scope

  • What are the key components of a project initiation document?
  • Business analysts must understand why the project is being done so that they can focus their analysis work in the appropriate areas. BAs should be involved in the development of project scope.
  • Manage the change control process to ensure that once the scope of the project has been approved, all project participants will operate within the scope or formally approve any scope changes.
  • Keep your business analyst within the scope of the project.

.5 hours

Documenting and Validating Requirements

  • Understand what is a requirement and why is it important to elicit and document requirements.
  • 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
    • Technical 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?
  • The requirements package. Review the components of the requirements package and look at a sample of the structured text, diagrams, and format.
  • Overview of the core requirements components: data, process, externals, business rules. Why is it important for business analysts to document each component?
  • Validate the resulting solution meets the business needs.

1 hour

Planning the Analysis Work

  • Define the business analysis planning framework. Assist business analysts with identifying the sources of information, scheduling information gathering sessions, getting user commitment, scheduling requirements reviews.
  • Discuss how a business analyst should collect, organize, and maintain project information.
  • People - stakeholder analysis and communication planning.
  • Project - Determine the project type and which requirements are appropriate.
  • Process - Assist business analysts in choosing analysis techniques for the project.
  • Use the project scope documentation and the plan to estimate the time required to complete business analysis.
  • Understand the project and business risks to help keep business analysts focused in the right areas.

1 hour

Managing the Requirements Process

  • Support the requirements elicitation process. Understand the most productive BA work environments.
  • Resolve project issues and problems by working with the project sponsor.
  • Assist the business analyst with complex requirements.
  • Learn the importance of formal requirements peer reviews.
  • Review key project success factors.

.5 hours

Current Industry Trends

  • International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®)
    • Professional organization for business analysis
    • Business Analysis Body of Knowedge (BABOK®) - standards for the profession
    • Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP®)
  • Agile development approaches.
    • Strengths and reasons for growth
    • Challenges for business analysis
  • Working with fewer IT personnel, off shore and contract programmers, outsourcing companies.
  • Lean - utilize business analysis to cut costs and waste.
  • Business analysis profession maturity.
Where do business analysts come from? Who makes a great business analyst?

.5 hours

Overview of Business Analysis
Course Length: 1/2 days
N/A

Currently we do not have any public classes scheduled for this course.