Overview
This two-day business analyst training course gives participants hands-on experience with proven techniques of discovering, understanding and documenting the business environment; understanding and depicting project scope; identifying, documenting and confirming business objectives; modelling current and desired business processes; and communicating all of these to all the stakeholders – colleagues, sponsors, customers, etc. The course covers key communication skills, interaction techniques and problem solving abilities that are essential to leverage a participant’s IT and business knowledge for effectively understanding, documenting and presenting the requirements that would be defining the scope of a project. The course strengthens the foundation of business analysis in the minds of the participant and empowers them with critical thinking, analytical skills and essential people skills to succeed in their roles in any organization, and add immense value to every project they are a part of.
What You'll Learn
- Define the business analyst profession
- Document requirements from the business perspective
- Bridge the communication gap between business stakeholders and technology solution providers
- Clearly document and communicate the scope of the projects
- Target the analysis and understand the consequences of the solution
- Pursue questions to discover root causes, not just symptoms
- Capture and verify business requirements
- Negotiate with business stakeholders and developers
- Improve communication skills through hands-on practice
- Organize and categorize project requirements
Curriculum
- Understanding the business analyst role and function
- The competencies of the business analyst
- The profession of business analysis
- The three most important communication skills for business analysis
- The biggest challenges Business Analysts confront
- Eliciting information
- Clarifying information
- Communication and miscommunication
- Validating information
- Why problem solving is key to business analysis
- Analyzing symptoms and causes
- Identifying and defining the problem
- Developing solutions
- Understanding the people side of problem solving
- Understanding interaction skills and why Business Analysts need them
- Facilitation with stakeholders
- Negotiation and conflict resolution
- Leadership and influencing
- Teamwork
- The business domain: What it is and what’s relevant to business analysis
- The IT domain: What it is and what’s relevant to business analysis
- The systems development lifecycle and focus on IT and business domains
- Strategy analysis defined
- The role of the Business analyst in strategy analysis
- Describing the business environment
- Describing the requirements scope
- Assessing feasibility
- Identifying project stakeholders
- Defining and documenting project scope
- Decomposing the application domain
- Analyzing and documenting key processes
- Eliciting functional requirements
- Modelling the desired state
- Requirements analysis defined
- Structuring the requirements
- Refining and writing better requirements
- Requirements collaboration defined
- Determining the appropriate requirements presentation format
- Creating the requirements package
- Presenting the requirements
- Conducting a formal requirements review
- Obtaining consensus and signoff of requirements
- Solution evaluation defined
- Key tasks of solution evaluation
- Solution evaluation practice
Who should attend
The course is suitable for anyone involved with systems development projects. The course is highly recommended for –
- Business customer, user or partner
- Business analyst
- Business system analyst
- Systems analyst
- Project manager
- Systems architect or designer
- Systems or application developer
- QA professional
- Systems tester
- Leader of systems projects or teams
- Anyone interested in enhancing their business analysis skills
