Soft Skills Training for Business Analysis (SSBA) – Outline

Detailed Course Outline

The Value of "Soft Skills" for Business Analysis

Why soft skills are important in business analysis

  • Identifying soft skills for solution development
  • Recognising your soft skills challenges

Introducing the BA Interaction Model

  • Creating the business analysis context
  • The product/solution development life cycle

Aligning soft skills competencies to elicitation

  • Collaboration
  • Facilitation
  • Active listening
  • Communication
  • Conflict resolution
  • Negotiation

Communicating the Business Need: Making Presentations

Deploying strategic collaboration techniques

  • Collaborating with high level stakeholders
  • Communicating the business need

Presenting to the organisation

  • Gaining buy–in: formal presentation techniques
  • Selling strategies: the value of the elevator pitch

Developing Dynamic Elicitation Skills

Eliciting requirements

  • Facing key stakeholder elicitation challenges
  • Establishing a collaborative environment through questioning

Creating dynamic questioning strategies

  • Reviewing different question types
  • Generating dynamic questions with an innovative questioning model

Working with nonverbal communication

  • Developing active listening strategies
  • Visualising and prototyping to achieve clarity

Elicitation strategies for requirements workshops

  • Building value through iterative elicitation
  • Discussing the design/define dilemma
  • Creating focus for prototyping with SCAMPER

Facilitating Meetings

Develop the skills to become a "Complete Facilitator"

  • Defining the characteristics of effective facilitators
  • Improving interpersonal and observational skills

Creating an assertive facilitation climate

  • Presenting the meeting agenda
  • Designing meeting ground rules
  • Opening and documenting the meeting
  • Questioning techniques to guide youraudience
  • Pros and cons of listening techniques
  • Closing the meeting

Advanced Facilitation Strategies and Techniques

Building consensus

  • Techniques for bringing an audience to consensus
  • When consensus can fail
  • Handling disagreements and mitigation techniques

Handling behaviours

  • Dealing with difficult people and group disfunction
  • Conflict resolution strategies
  • Creating a remediation plan

Negotiating and Communicating Issues

Principles of negotiation

  • Best practices for effective negotiation
  • Techniques for sharing information
  • Ranking and ordering priorities
  • Building acceptance criteria

Uncovering and communicating issues

  • Developing a process for issue management
  • Capturing and vetting stakeholder issues
  • Preframing issues to the project team
  • Enabling informed stakeholder decision making

Visualisation Strategies to Enhance Communication

Visualisation techniques

  • Utilising user stories to clarify requirements
  • Telling stories with graphs and charts
  • Brainstorming with mind maps
  • Identifying process issues with models

Applying soft skills for influence and leadership

  • Identifying key course takeaways for immediate implementation
  • Building your personal action plan