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Business Analysis Essentials for Project Managers

  • Course Length:
    3 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.

The best way to guarantee success of any type of project is to have a strong, experienced Project Manager and strong, experienced Business Analyst. These two individuals, working together from the beginning of the project, set the stage for success by accurately planning and clearly defining the expected outcomes. Both roles are necessary because they are each responsible for a different set of tasks and they each possess a set of skills that complement each other. The two roles are closely tied, but exactly what are the similarities and differences, and why does a project need both?

This course discusses the role of Business Analysts and the business analysis skills that a Project Manager should also possess. The business analysis skill set includes critical thinking skills, elicitation techniques and requirements analysis and management. Experienced project managers may already possess some of these skills, but may apply them differently than BAs. Understanding the complexity of the business analysis role will allow the PM and BA to work seamlessly and increase the project efficiency.

Scoping is one of the most critical areas on which the PM and BA should work together. In addition to the project scope, as defined in the PMBOK™, the BA is responsible for defining the scope of business analysis. When these two components of scope are combined they define the entire boundary of the project. In this course, Project Managers will learn how Business Analysts define the scope of the area for which they will be performing analysis. This is just one example of a task with separate roles for the PM and BA. Understanding their unique roles is critical to project success.

In this course students will:

  • Learn to analyze and scope the area of analysis to clarify the level and complexity of the business analysis effort needed for the project.
  • Learn what is an excellent requirement and the difference between business and functional requirements.
  • Learn the five core components necessary to analyze a business area.
  • Be introduced to the most commonly used analysis techniques.
  • Discuss alternatives for traceability of requirements.
  • Plan an approach for analyzing, categorizing, and managing requirements. Determine the level of formality required and consider options for documenting and packaging requirements based on project type, priorities, and risks.
  • Identify techniques and documentation options appropriate for the various software development. approaches and project types (COTS, maintenance, business process improvement, new development, etc).
  • Understand how validating requirements impacts the project and the components of software testing.
  • Review business analysis requirements to improve the quality of your deliverables.

Intended Audience

This course is designed for Project Managers who are responsible for reviewing requirements, managing the business analysis efforts, overseeing the testing efforts, or obtaining sign-off on the business analysis deliverables. For PMs who are also responsible for gathering the business requirements, we recommend that they attend all of the core courses on business analysis.

Prerequisites

None

Introduction

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

1 hour

Project Participants and their Roles

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

1 hour

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.

4.5 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 of the business and design of the solutions 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
    • 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 identifying test cases and refining requirements based on quality assurance principles.

2 hours

Course Summary

  • Review business analysis 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 Processes and Standards

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

Optional - as time allows

Business Analysis Essentials for Project Managers
Course Length: 3 days
N/A

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