Course Overview:

This 4-day Business Analyst training course will give you hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques for identifying a project's scope, developing and discovering requirements and uses cases, and documenting them expertly. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises will provide you with the competence and confidence to improve project outcomes through better requirements elicitation and use case development. You'll gain a thorough understanding of the challenges faced in defining correct

requirements, practical approaches for eliciting and documenting requirements, and strategies for managing requirements throughout the project life cycle. If you play a role in defining project scope, capturing requirements, or managing project scope, you can't afford to miss this course!

Target Audience:

Anyone involved in business analysis would benefit from this business analyst training course. This business analyst training course is perfect for you if you are a(n)…

• Business customer, user or partner
• Business Analyst
• Business Systems 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

Learning Objectives:

Individuals certified at this level will have demonstrated their understanding of:

• Bridge the expectations gap between business stakeholders and technology solution providers
• Enhance business analysis techniques to reduce project cost
• Implement practical methods for understanding user requirements
• Improve your requirements elicitation, development and documentation
• Understand and describe the business environment in which a project exists
• Explore proven tactics for managing project scope
• Focus on discovering root causes, not just symptoms
• Gain tools and techniques for developing more precise requirements
• Practice state-of-the-art business and system modeling techniques
• Organize and categorize project requirements
• Quickly identify accurate use cases for new or enhanced business systems
• Produce high-quality, readable use case documentation
• Avoid common use case traps and pitfalls
• Overcome real-world challenges that confront today’s Business Analysts

Prerequisites:

There are no prerequisites for this course.

Course Materials:

Students will receive a course manual with presentation slides and reference materials.

Examination:

There is no exam for this course.

Technical Requirements:

For eBooks:

Internet for downloading the eBook

Laptop, tablet, Smartphone, eReader (No Kindle)

Adobe DRM supported software (e.g. Digital Editions, Bluefire Reader)

eBook download and activation instructions

Agenda:

The Business Analysis Profession

• IIBA® and the BABOK®
• What is Business Analysis?
• Business and Solution Domains—how they relate
• Key roles in requirements development
• The competencies of the Business Analyst
• Distinguishing novice and expert Business Analysts
• Effective communication
• Six important BA skills
• Practice sessions

The Business Case for Good Requirements

What is a good requirement?

• Requirements attributes—who needs them?
• Key practices that promote excellent requirements
• The cost of requirements errors
• Requirements engineering overview
• Practice sessions

Foundations of Requirements Development

• Key terms in requirements development
• A strategy for analyzing systems
• Common requirement-classification schemes
• The three parts of a system
• Levels and types of requirements
• The importance of traceability
• Understanding the business context of projects
• Practice sessions

Project Initiation: Eliciting High-level and Mid-level Requirements

• Understanding product vision and project scope
• Identifying and describing project stakeholders
• Modeling the business
• Identifying systems and actors
• Determining scope
• Understanding and identifying use cases
• Taking the Agile approach: writing user stories
• Identifying and defining data
• Documenting business rules
• Finding quality attributes
• Practice sessions

Improving Requirements Quality

• Requirements quality
• Common problems with requirements
• Analyze for ambiguity
• Requirements inspection, analysis and improvement
• Defining and documenting the project scope
• Practice sessions

Eliciting Detailed Requirements

• 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
• Refine and rewrite for clarity
• Practice sessions

Documenting Requirements with Use Cases

• Use case basics
• Ways to identify use cases
• 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 sessions

Packaging and Presenting Requirements

• Organizing and packaging requirements
• Presenting requirements for review
• Baselining the requirements
• Getting to consensus and approval
• Conduct formal and informal reviews
• Documenting requirements in a Requirements Specification
• Practice sessions