Business Analyst Boot Camp

Course Code: 1602

$2695

Overview
Schedule classes
What you'll learn
Outline
Prerequisites
Who should attend

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.

Schedule Classes

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Course Delivery

This course is available in the following formats:

Live Classroom
Duration: 4 days

Live Virtual Classroom
Duration: 4 days

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

Outline

Module 1: The Business Analysis profession

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

Module 2: The business case of good requirements

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

Module 3: Foundations of Requirements Development

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

Module 4: Project initiation: Eliciting high-level and mid-level requirements

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

Module 5: 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
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

Module 6: Improving requirements quality

Requirements quality
Common problems with requirements
Analyze for ambiguity
Requirements inspection, analysis, and improvement
Practice: Analyze and re-write requirements

Module 7: Documenting requirements with use cases and user stories

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

Module 8: Packaging and presenting requirements

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

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.