Essential Skills for Business Analysis

Course Description

To stay competitive in today’s fast paced economy, companies need to deliver innovations that meet business or market needs without spending time on the wrong problem or rework for missed requirements. This foundational course provides students, regardless of their title, the essential business analyst skills necessary to identify the best solutions and realize significant value on their projects. It supports the IIBA BABOK^® industry standards and PMI’s PBA.

Business Analyst Skills

This course explores the breadth of business analyst skills, tasks and interactions expected in a professional role. It provides a complete foundational set of practical tips and hands on exercises to build expertise and confidence using requirements delivery strategies, independent of methodology.

Classroom Experience

Highly interactive exercises provide students opportunities to practice and reinforce techniques during class. Regardless of the participant’s skill level, the workshop cases and discussions inspire learning insights for every level of experience.

This is an excellent course to be held onsite at your organization to level set analysts across the organization. It provides consistent terminology, project participant roles, templates, and suggested standards for an organization to use as a starting point to add their unique customizations.

Students are encouraged to bring projects into class for exercises and to develop a more personalized post-class action plan to take their project to the next step.

Learning Objectives

• Define business analysis and requirements
• Elicit requirements from stakeholders using a variety of effective techniques
• Practice creative thinking skills to engage stakeholders, uncover needs, and identify new approaches and ideas
• Compare and contrast analysis techniques in order to select the technique(s) that will most appropriately:
  • support your understanding, critical thinking and problem solving
  • communicate information to stakeholders to enable review and their understanding of requirements
• Reduce confusion and development errors by creating excellent requirements that can be easily understood by outsourced or distributed teams
• Get the most out of your models and diagrams by asking the right questions during analysis
• Identify why the project is being done (business drivers) in order to ensure the right analysis effort is being performed and so that requirements efforts can be appropriately prioritized
• Create a context data flow diagram to identify interfaces, data flows, and high-level processes associated with the project, that is valuable both for planning and communications purposes
• Discuss strategies for content organization and collaboration, and describe why being more organized increases team agility
• Practice creating an analysis approach to make the most efficient use of elicitation and analysis techniques
• Learn to address common barriers that face project teams

Intended Audience

This course is designed for individuals from any discipline who are performing elicitation activities; business analysts, project managers, business systems analysts, product managers, product owners, system architect, process engineers, requirements engineers, or any other project team member.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites to attend this class.