Overview
The Business Analyst Boot Camp empowers participants with an understanding of the fundamental analysis tools and techniques, including methods to understand the business environment, define a problem using a systematic approach and influence and inform project stakeholders at all levels. The course strengthens the foundation of business analysis and equips business analysts with the critical thinking, analytical skills and necessary people skills to attack the problem of project failures by addressing their root causes. During this four-day business analyst training program, participants gain hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques to identify the scope of a project, developing and discovering requirements, user stories and use cases, while also documenting them expertly. The course incorporates practical and realistic hands-on exercises and activities that ensure that participants get a thorough practical understanding of the concepts discussed in the boot camp.
What You'll Learn
- Identify the essential skills of a business analyst
- Analyze the business environment in which a project occurs
- Improve the process of requirement elicitation, development and documentation
- Enhance business analysis techniques to reduce project cost
- Practice eliciting and validating information from project stakeholders
- Develop business model components such as a context diagram, activity diagram and use case model
- Work as a team to analyze business artifacts and documents to discover the functional requirements needed
- Practice writing user stories and acceptance criteria
- Produce well-written use case diagrams and narratives
- Generate a plan for bringing these methods back to your organization
Curriculum
- IIBA® and the BABOK®; The PMI® Guide to Business Analysis and the Business Analysis For Practitioners: A Study Guide
- What is Business Analysis?
- Business and Solution Domains—how they relate
- Key roles in requirements development in SDLC and Agile projects
- The competencies of the Business Analyst
- Distinguishing novice and expert Business Analysts
- Effective communication
- Six important BA skills
- Practice: Business analysis definition
- Practice: Competencies of a business analyst
- What is a good requirement?
- Requirements versus design
- Requirement attributes—who needs them?
- Key practices that promote excellent requirements
- The cost of requirements errors
- Requirements engineering overview
- Practice: Characteristics of good requirements
- Practice: Explore the differences between requirements and design
- Practice: Evaluate requirements for effectiveness
- Practice: Factors to improve project success
- Key terms in requirements development
- A strategy for analyzing systems
- Common requirement-classification schemes
- The three levels of a system
- Levels and types of requirements
- The importance of traceability
- Understanding the business context of projects
- Practice: Define key terms
- Practice: Use a framework to drive out requirements
- Practice: Types of requirements
- Practice: Classifying stakeholders’ input
- Practice: Evaluate a fictitious but realistic organization for project alignment
- Understanding product vision and project scope
- Identifying and describing project stakeholders and personas
- Modeling the business
- Analyzing the current state and defining the future state
- Identifying systems and actors
- Determining scope
- Understanding and identifying use cases and user stories
- Taking the Agile approach: writing user stories
- Identifying and defining data
- Documenting business rules
- Finding quality attributes
- Defining and documenting the project scope
- Practice: Modeling the business
- Practice: Context diagramming
- Practice: Ways to identify use cases and user stories
- Practice: Brainstorming and chunkifying
- Practice: Roles and Permissions matrix
- Practice: Use case diagramming
- Practice: User stories
- Practice: High-level data definition
- Practice: Entity relationship diagramming
- Practice: Writing business rules and quality attributes
- Practice: Evaluate a Scope Statement
- Overview of requirements-elicitation techniques
- Decompose processes to lowest levels
- Document analysis
- Modeling processes to generate interview questions
- Interviewing the stakeholders
- Documenting the interview and resulting requirements
- Adding detail to requirements we already have
- Refining and rewriting for clarity
- Practice: Elicitation techniques – advantages/disadvantages
- Practice: Process modeling
- Practice: Generating good interview questions
- Practice: Coping with challenging situations
- Practice: Interview simulations
- Practice: Writing new requirements and refining existing requirements
- Practice: CRUD matrix and CRUD functional requirements
- Requirements quality
- Common problems with requirements
- Analyze for ambiguity
- Requirements inspection, analysis, and improvement
- Practice: Analyze and re-write requirements
- Better user stories using the INVEST model
- Defining acceptance criteria
- Decomposition of user stories
- Considering use cases for decomposing user stories
- Use case basics
- Use cases and requirements
- Usage narrative
- Anatomy of a fully dressed use case
- Writing effective use case narratives
- Understanding sub-use cases
- Linking use cases for larger or more complex systems
- Use case quality
- Avoiding common traps and pitfalls
- Practice: Write acceptance criteria and perform peer reviews
- Practice: Decompose user stories
- Practice: Write a usage narrative
- Practice: Write a fully dressed use case and perform peer reviews
- Practice: Check use case quality
- Organizing and packaging requirements
- Presenting requirements for review
- Baselining the requirements
- User story backlog management
- Managing requirements changes
- Getting to consensus and approval
- Conducting formal and informal reviews
- Documenting requirements in a Requirements Specification
- Practice: Examine and evaluate a sample Requirements Specification
- Practice: Discuss strategies for presenting requirements to stakeholders
- Practice: Review how to determine impact analysis for changes to the requirements
- Practice: Create a personal action plan for success
Who should attend
Anyone involved in business analysis would find this course to be extremely beneficial. The course is highly recommended for –
- Business customer, user or partner
- Business analyst
- Business system analyst
- Systems analyst
- Project manager or team leader
- Systems architect or designer
- IT manager/director
- Systems or application developer
- QA professional
- Systems tester
- Anyone wanting to enhance their business analysis skills
Prerequisites
There are no mandatory prerequisites for this course, however, completing the Business Analyst Fundamentals course prior to taking up this course would be beneficial.
