Complete 4 days of Business Analyst and Business Requirements training in one fast-paced Boot Camp - save time and money.

Develop Critical Business Analyst Skills

Business Analysts provide an essential function by assessing and analyzing the business environment, defining the scope of business problems, capturing project requirements, designing high-value solution approaches, and ensuring that the defined scope meets the customer's needs, goals, objectives, and expectations. This practical workshop will provide participants with 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. You will gain pragmatic solutions to sustain stakeholder engagement throughout the project lifecycle, including questioning, listening, business need identification, problem solving, presentation, validation, and acceptance of the effective solution.

Analyze Business Problems and Identify Requirements for the Correct Solutions

Delays, cancellations and defects in systems development projects stem in large part from our inability to understand project requirements and the environment in which they exist, as well as our inability to communicate those requirements clearly enough to enlist the collaboration and commitment of all core project stakeholders. The accumulating evidence is unequivocal: most serious problems associated with projects are related directly to requirements.

Business Analyst Boot Camp solidifies the foundations 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: incomplete, poorly defined, and/or changing requirements.

Practice Real-World Tools and Techniques for Immediate Application

This four-day 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!

In Class Workshops and Group Exercises:

Practical and realistic hands-on exercises and activities allow you to refine and enhance your problem definition, communication and problem solving skills. Through group effort, you and your peers will discuss ways your department or company should be handling problems up front and how you can improve the early, critical stages of a project. You and your peers will identify and discuss strategies and tactics that your organization should be using to better define project scope, discover requirements, and document use cases.

Specifically, you will:

• Evaluate the essential skills of a Business Analyst
• Explore and understand common differences in work and communication styles and how they affect interactions on a project
• Analyze the business environment in which your project occurs
• Practice project initiation techniques to clarify project scope
• Practice soliciting and validating information from project stakeholders
• Determine how best to present your findings to business stakeholders, and prepare for effective interactions
• Assess your individual and team communication effectiveness
• Learn to elicit and manage requirements from a realistic business case project
• 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
• Learn to identify and extract important functional requirements from a process model
• Work as a team to establish appropriate level of detail in a use case
• Review requirements elicitation and use-case discovery methods
• Produce well written use case diagrams and narratives
• Understand how use cases are linked for large and/or complex systems
• Improve your ability to write high-quality statements of requirements
• Learn how use cases can improve your software testing and QA process
• Generate a plan for bringing these methods back to your organization

Learn how to:

• 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

Immediate Benefits of Attending This Class:

1. Learn how to help your business customers be clear about the current state of their business
2. Understand and influence how business processes can be improved 1.
3. Improve project initiation by clarifying discussions of scope, increasing stakeholder involvement, and identifying exclusions and constraints up front 2.
4. Explore the Systems Development Life Cycle phases and the work to be done in each phase 3.
5. Help to bridge the gap between business customers and designers, developers, and testers 4.
6. Understand the organizational environment in which you are working and in which your project exists 5.
7. Use practical, real-world methods for initiating conversations with users to identify the business problem to be solved 6.
8. Discover tips and tricks that have helped other Business 7.
9. Analysts be successful with real-world projects 8.
10. Examine, review and refine requirements so they are specific, accurate and unambiguous 9.
11. Use effective practices for interviewing business customers to learn their requirements 10.
12. Learn the fundamentals of business process modeling for eliciting requirements 11.
13. Examine ways to discover and write business rules that affect a system 12.
14. Understand the importance of categorizing and prioritizing requirements 13.
15. Distinguish business and user requirements from solution requirements and know when it's appropriate to define and document each 14.
16. Manage project scope by identifying and managing changes to requirements throughout the project lifecycle. 15.
17. Learn how use cases fit into the life cycle 16.
18. Understand the relationship between use cases and requirements 17.
19. Translate users' statements of needed system behavior and functionality into high-quality use-cases 18.
20. Determine and document normal, alternate, and exception scenarios 19.
21. Overcome common pitfalls and traps encountered when using the use case approach 20.
22. Enhance relationships with stakeholders throughout your organization and improve your ability to satisfy stakeholders from both the business and the IT organizations 21.
23. Help your organization understand and apply state-of-the-art methods for discovering and documenting project requirements 22.
24. Better control project scope by identifying and gaining consensus on requirements throughout the project life cycle 23.
25. Reduce project costs and improve their quality by defining the right requirements the right way the first time, every time!

Course Outline

I. The Business Analysis Profession
It's only in recent years that business analysis has begun to be recognized as a profession in its own right. While people have been performing the Business Analyst role in organizations for several decades, differing definitions of the role abound. We'll start the workshop by exploring some of them, as well as gaining a clear understanding of where the industry appears to be heading and some emerging standards for the profession.

A. The profession of Business Analysis
B. Understanding the Business Analyst role and function
C. The business and IT domains, and how they are relevant to Business Analysts
D. The competencies of the Business Analyst
E. Distinguishing novice and expert Business Analysts
F. The six most important business analyst skills

Practice Session for this chapter:
• Business Analysis Definition & Functional Competencies

II. Business Case and Foundations of Requirements Engineering
IT projects have especially high failure rates, and evidence points to problems with defining requirements as one primary cause. This section presents an overview of the challenges inherent in projects in general, and specific problems typically encountered with IT project requirements. We also examine some common terms and concepts in requirements engineering.

A. Facts and figures about IT project success, failure, and requirements errors
B. The high cost of requirements errors
C. Key terms in requirement engineering
D. Strategy for requirements development
E. Characteristics of effective requirements
F. Levels of requirements

Practice Sessions for this chapter:
• Define Key Terms, Are These Requirements?
• Levels of Requirements

III. Enterprise Analysis
One of the most overlooked functions of a Business Analyst is the enterprise assessment, which can also yield some of the most valuable findings of a project. Enterprise assessments are a key best practice in business analysis, and they can be surprisingly straightforward. During this portion of the workshop, we'll explore some practical techniques that produce keen, relevant, and useful insights for the business organization. As we consider the sources of requirements, we'll also look more closely at the types of requirements, how to classify them, and three useful tools for the requirements discovery process.

A. Enterprise analysis defined
B. The role of the Business Analyst in enterprise assessment
C. Describing the business environment
D. Sources of requirements and their risks
E. Types of requirements and how to classify them
F. Three useful tools for developing requirements

Practice Sessions for this chatper:
• Case Project Enterprise Analysis
• Types of Requirements
• Classify Stakeholder Input

IV. Project Initiation
What most people think of as business analysis is central to project initiation. Because of the depth of skill these activities require, most Business Analysts demand separate training to develop true mastery. This course module therefore provides an overview and introduction to three crucial business analysis activities by demonstrating common tools for identifying and documenting project scope, for modeling current and desired states, and for stakeholder identification. And because effective initiation can lay the foundation for effective use case development, we'll introduce use cases and begin to identify them in this module, too.

A. Understanding product vision and project scope
B. Identifying and describing project stakeholders
C. Modeling the business
D. Identifying systems and actors
E. Determining scope
F. Understanding use cases
G. Identifying project use cases
H. Decomposing to the mid-level view
I. Documenting project scope

Practice Sessions for this chapter:
• Modeling the Business
• Actor/Goal Identification
• Context Diagramming
• Use Case Diagramming
• Activity Diagramming
• Complete the Project Scope Definition Document

V.Eliciting Functional and Non-functional Requirements
Savvy business analysts and project team members have a variety of techniques for finding the functional and non-functional requirements on their projects. This section introduces several of the most powerful and effective analysis techniques and discusses their use in requirements elicitation. As various techniques are covered, the workshop explores how to capture and document the requirements, including effective requirements analysis and traceability.

A. Eliciting requirements: an overview
B. Modeling the processes
C. Interviewing the stakeholders
D. Discovering and documenting data requirements
E. Documenting and tracing requirements
F. Developing quality attribute requirements

Practice Sessions for this chapter:
• Process Flowchart
• Interviewing Simulation
• CRUD Matrix/CRUD Function Requirements

VI. Documenting Requirements with Use Cases
Developing use cases is fairly straightforward, but someone actually has to document the use cases and requirements discovered during the requirements elicitation process. This section of the workshop focuses on how to apply the knowledge you've gained so far to writing a use case. It also examines more complex aspects of uses cases, including the includes and extends relationships and use-case linkages in larger systems.

A. Usage narratives
B. Use case briefs
C. Anatomy of a use case
D. Use case scenarios
E. Writing effective use case descriptions
F. Understanding includes and extends relationships
G. Linking uses cases for larger or more complex systems

Practice Sessions for this chapter:
• Write a Usage Narrative
• Write a Use Case Brief
• Write a Fully Dressed Use Case
• Identify Use Case Relationships

VII. Improving Use Case and Requirements Quality
Merely writing use cases is not sufficient for capturing all project requirements. Analysts must know how to organize the use cases for readability and how to document other requirements hinted at in the use cases, as well as how to assure use case quality. During this part of the workshop, we will apply standards for quality to our use cases and requirements and look at some proven ways to prevent common problems. We'll also learn to derive maximum benefit from reviews throughout the life cycle. We'll then take a closer look at the issue of requirements quality, focusing on writing effective requirements through analysis, refinement, and review.

A. Use case quality
B. Common use case traps and pitfalls
C. Requirements quality
D. Common problems with requirements
E. Requirements inspection, analysis and improvement
F. Validating requirements through reviews and inspections

Practice Sessions for this chapter:
• Check Use Case Quality
• Analyze Requirements
• Refine Requirements

VIII. Creating the Requirements Specification
Once we've worked with stakeholders to define their functional and non-functional requirements and to document, refine, and organize the requirements, we have to package those requirements into a specification. In addition, most systems also possess a significant number of requirements that aren't necessarily associated with specific business functions. These types of non-functional requirements must also be captured and documented as part of the complete requirement specification. This portion of the Boot Camp covers how to package the requirements into a specification that can be used for system development and testing.

A. Organizing requirements
B. Documenting requirements with the Software Requirements Specification (SRS)
C. Exploring other non-functional requirements: usability, availability, reliability, scalability, performance, and supportability
D. Understanding design constraints
E. Identifying other requirements

Practice Sessions for this chapter:
• Review a Requirements Specification
• Complete a Requirements Specification Document

IX. Requirements Communication and Management
After user requirements have been discovered and documented, they have to be validated with business customers, users, and management. Communicating these functional and non-functional requirements involves much more than information sharing; at its best, it's a process of negotiation, validation, and consensus building. That process continues throughout the development lifecycle as the Business Analyst works with users and other stakeholders to manage the project requirements. We'll examine the inherent communication challenges and help you confidently choose the best ways to achieve your communication goals and gain the stakeholder buy-in required for successful requirements management throughout the project lifecycle.

A. Requirements communication defined
B. Determining the appropriate requirements presentation format
C. Creating the requirements package
D. Presenting the requirements
E. Conducting a formal requirements review
F. Obtaining consensus and signoff of requirements
G. Aprocess for managing change
H. Managing your own requirements engineering skills

Practice Sessions for this chapter:
• Present Requirements to Stakeholders
• Create a Real-World Application Plan

Who Should Attend This Course

All technical professionals associated with the specification, design, development and testing of products will benefit from this two-day program. Some of the professionals this will benefit include:

• Business Customer, user or partner
• Product Owners
• Team Members
• Project Manager
• Project Lead
• Project Sponsors
• IT Manager/Directors
• Business Analyst
• Developers/Programmers