Course Code: 19288

Business Analyst Fundamentals

Class Dates:
11/13/2024
9/4/2024
Length:
3 Days
Cost:
$2395.00
Class Time:
Technology:
Business
Delivery:
Instructor-Led Training, Virtual Instructor-Led Training

Overview

  • Course Overview
  • This business analyst training course will give you hands-on experience with proven techniques for discovering, understanding, and documenting the business environment; understanding and depicting project scope; identifying, documenting, and confirming business objectives; modeling current and desired business processes; and communicating all of these expertly to colleagues, sponsors, and business customers. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises provide you with the competence and confidence to improve project outcomes through better project scope and business requirements definition. You'll gain a thorough understanding of common analysis pitfalls and challenges, practical approaches for discovering and writing project requirements, and strategies for applying the systems development life cycle methodology throughout the project.
  • Audience
  • Business customer, user or partner
    Business Analyst
    Business Systems Analyst
    Systems Analyst
    Project Manager
    Systems Architect or Designer
    Systems or Application Developer
    QA Professional
    Systems Tester
    Leader of Systems projects or teams
    Anyone wanting to enhance his/her business analysis skills

Prerequisites

Course Details

  • Skills Gained
  • Define the Business Analyst profession
  • Understand requirements from the business perspective
  • Bridge the communication gap between business stakeholders and technology solution providers
  • Clearly document and communicate the scope of your projects
  • Target your analysis and understand consequences of solutions
  • Ask targeted 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
  • Understand activity decomposition and modeling with simple graphical methods
  • The Business Analysis Profession
  • Understanding the Business Analyst role and function
  • The competencies of the Business Analyst
  • The profession of business analysis
  • Practice Session: Because Business Analysts work with people throughout their organizations
  • Good teamwork and communication skills
  • Communication in the Business Analysis Context
  • The three most important communication skills for business analysis
  • The biggest challenges Business Analysts confront
  • Eliciting information
  • Clarifying information
  • Communication and miscommunication
  • Validating information
  • Practice Session: Working in small groups, you and your peers will practice choosing appropriate techniques to solicit information from stakeholders at various levels in an organization,
  • Following a fun demonstration of how miscommunication occurs, you'll enhance your ability to connect with stakeholders and foster effective communication by clarifying stakeholders' contributions and
  • Analytical Thinking and Problem Solving
  • Why problem solving is key to business analysis
  • Identifying and defining the problem
  • Developing solutions
  • Understanding the people side of problem solving
  • Practice Session: Guided by your instructor, you will work with a team to analyze the symptoms of a problem, define it, and determine root causes.
  • You'll practice team problem-solving techniques and determine, based on your team's performance, ways to further enhance your communication and team collaboration skills.
  • Interaction Skills for Business Analysis
  • Understanding interaction skills and why Business Analysts need them
  • Facilitation and negotiation with stakeholders
  • Leadership and influencing
  • Teamwork, Practice Session:
  • Following review and discussion of interaction skills and their application to business analysis functions, you and your team will play a fun learning game that allows you to demonstrate
  • reinforce, and earn prizes for your knowledge of these vital skills.
  • Business and IT Knowledge
  • 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 the focus on IT and business domains
  • Practice Session: Working with your team, you'll quickly test and improve your understanding of how the business and IT domains integrate in the Business Analyst role and how they fit with the systems
  • development lifecycle.
  • Enterprise Analysis
  • Enterprise analysis defined
  • The role of the Business Analyst in enterprise assessment
  • Describing the business environment
  • Describing the requirements scope
  • Assessing feasibility
  • Practice Session: Your instructor will introduce a hypothetical but realistic case project company, and you and your team will put your analysis skills to the test as you conduct a guided assessment.
  • You'll define and document the business environment, clearly describe the scope of the business, and perform a straightforward identification of business opportunities.
  • Finally, you'll assess the feasibility of a set of projects and present recommendations on the project(s) of greatest value to the business.
  • Project Initiation and Analysis
  • Identifying project stakeholders
  • Defining and documenting project scope
  • Decomposing the application domain
  • Analyzing and documenting key processes
  • Eliciting functional requirements
  • Modeling the desired state
  • Practice Session: After reviewing a project request for an identified business opportunity, you'll work with peers and your instructor to determine and document the project scope with context diagram
  • You'll then review a current state model of one key business process, and, based on identified functional requirements, you will then work with your team to develop a model for a possible new process
  • Requirements Analysis
  • Requirements analysis defined
  • Structuring the requirements
  • Refining and writing better requirements
  • Practice Session: Working with a set of identified functional requirements, you and your peers will analyze them against a set of criteria for effective requirements.
  • You'll practice clarifying and rewriting requirements to improve their specificity and accuracy.
  • Requirements Communication
  • Requirements communication 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
  • Practice Session: Working with a requirements from our case project, you and your peers will determine which communication approaches will best meet the needs of various stakeholders.
  • You'll practice categorizing and organizing requirements for maximum value, and you'll explore how to develop and present clear, concise requirements documentation appropriate for your projects.
  • Solution Assessment and Validation
  • Solution assessment and validation defined
  • Key tasks of solution assessment
  • Solution assessment and validation practice
  • Practice Session: Working with your small group, you will identify ways to assess the validity of a solution and to determine whether the solution meets the stakeholders' needs.