Detailed Course Outline
Defining Business Analysis
Overview of the business analysis discipline
- What is business analysis?
- The scope of the business analyst’s work
- Responsibilities of the business analyst
Introducing the business analysis process
- From strategy analysis to requirements engineering
- Best practices used throughout the business analysis process
Performing Strategic Analysis
Introducing strategy analysis
- Identifying strategic context
- Performing root cause analysis
Internal analysis
- Responding to business challenges through internal analysis
- Identifying your key stakeholders
- Clarifying the organisational mission using MOST
External analysis
- Optimising organisational flexibility using external analysis
- Investigating competitive pressures using Porter’s Five Forces
- Analysing the business landscape using PESTLE
Analysing and Managing Your Stakeholders
Identifying your stakeholders
- The stakeholder wheel and identification matrix
- Creating stakeholder personas
Analysing your stakeholders
- Examining stakeholder impact for your project
- Evaluating stakeholder attitude towards your project
- Placing your stakeholder in the organisational hierarchy using STOP
- Developing action-oriented business initiatives to address business needs and opportunities
Managing your stakeholders
- Interacting with your stakeholders
- Creating a stakeholder communication plan
- Assessing your stakeholders
Defining the Solution
Exploring business and technical options
- Forming scope from business goals and objectives
- Writing the business requirements
Developing criteria and solutions
- Making use of affinity diagrams to elicit high-level criteria
- Comparing evaluation techniques
Making the Business Case
- The structure of the business case
- Creating a pyramid of information
Using customer-focused persuasion
- Analysing costs and benefits
- Categories of costs and benefits
- Identifying tangible and intangible costs and benefits
- Investment appraisal using a cash flow forecast
- Evaluating risk and impact
The Requirements Engineering Framework
Defining requirements
- The cost of poor requirements
- Distinguishing between functional and non-functional requirements
- Key sources of requirements
Planning the requirements communication process
- Addressing common pitfalls typically encountered during requirements development
- Actors in the requirements engineering process
- Dealing with tacit and explicit knowledge
Developing the requirements document
- Building the requirements list
- Applying requirements filters
- Developing well-formed requirements
Establishing the Requirements
The elicitation process
- Elicitation tools and techniques
- Guidelines and checklists
Eliciting the requirements
- Conducting effective interviews and workshops
- Deploying observation techniques
- Getting user feedback by using prototypes
- Analysing the situation using visualisation techniques
- Spotting non-functional requirements using quantitative analysis
Analysing the Requirements
Organising and prioritising requirements
- Arranging requirements by focus
- Gap analysis techniques
Employing modelling techniques
- Modelling the business context
- Shaping the business processes
- Inspecting the requirements
Writing the Requirements Documentation
Creating formal requirements documentation
- Structuring a standard functional requirement
- Structuring a standard non-functional requirement
Creating agile requirements documentation
- Developing and splitting user stories
- Crafting, and elaborating on, use cases
Validating the requirements
- Stakeholders and their areas of concern
- Types of validation
Managing the written requirements
- Dealing with changing requirements
- Sources of requirements change
- Components of requirements management
Presenting the Business Solution
- Delivering the requirements
- Transferring the business solution
- Supporting developmental activities