CA13 - Business Analysis Foundation - 3 Days

Course Description

Customisation

For on-site courses (i.e. at your premises), we are more than happy to tailor the course agenda to suit your exact requirements. In many cases, we are able to build your in-house standards and naming conventions into the delivered course.

Course Details

1. What is Business Analysis
1.1. The business change lifecycle
1.2. The principles of business analysis
1.3. The variants of the business analyst role

2. The Competencies of a Business Analyst
2.1. The concept of the T-shaped Professional
2.2. The three areas of business analysis competency

3. The Strategic Context for Business Analysis
3.1. Business analysis and the strategic context
3.2. The factors assessed using PESTLE to analyse an external environment
3.3. The elements of the VMOST technique used to analyse an internal environment
3.4. Performance measurement, critical success factors, key performance indicators
3.5. SWOT analysis
3.6. Strategy execution, the POPIT model, business model canvas

4. The Business Analysis Service Framework
4.1. Situation investigation and problem analysis
4.2. Feasibility assessment and business case development
4.3. Business process improvement
4.4. Requirements definition
4.5. Business acceptance testing
4.6. Business change deployment
4.7. Stakeholder engagement

5. Investigating the Business Situation
5.1. Workshops
5.2. Observation, formal observation, shadowing
5.3. Interviews
5.4. Scenarios
5.5. Prototyping
5.6. User role analysis, personas
5.7. Quantitative approaches, surveys or questionnaires, activity sampling, document analysis
5.8. Rich pictures, mind maps

6. Analysing and Managing Stakeholders
6.1. Stakeholder categories, the stakeholder wheel
6.2. The Power/Interest grid technique, analysing stakeholders, stakeholder management strategies
6.3. Stakeholder responsibilities, RACI

7. Improving Business Services and Processes
7.1. Business process hierarchy
7.2. Modelling enterprise level processes, SIPOC, value chain analysis, value propositions
7.3. Event response levels, business events, business process models, UML activity models
7.4. Analysis considerations at actor-task level
7.5. The as-is process model, identifying problems, analysing handoffs, analysing tasks and procedures
7.6. Improving business processes
7.7. Customer journey maps

8. Defining the Solution
8.1. Gap analysis
8.2. The use of POPIT in gap analysis
8.3. The process for developing options, types of options
8.4. The purpose of design thinking, divergent and convergent thinking

9. Making the Business Case
9.1. The lifecycle for a business case in business case development
9.2. Areas of feasibility assessment
9.3. The structure and contents of a business case, categories of costs and benefits, impact assessment, risk assessment
9.4. Production of a business case within an Agile context
9.5. Elements of a CARDI Log
9.6. Investment appraisal techniques, payback, discounted cash flow and net present value, internal rate of return

10. Establishing the Requirements
10.1. The requirements engineering framework
10.2. Actors in requirements engineering, business representatives, project team
10.3. Types of requirement
10.4. Hierarchy of requirements
10.5. Requirements elicitation techniques, tacit knowledge
10.6. Elements of requirements analysis, requirements filters, INVEST, prioritising requirements using MoSCoW, business rules

11. Documenting and Modelling Requirements
11.1. Documentation styles, text-based, diagrammatic
11.2. Elements of a requirements catalogue
11.3. Format of user stories
11.4. The elements of a use case diagram used to model functional requirements
11.5. The elements of a class model used to model data
11.6. The product backlog in modelling and documentation in an Agile environment
11.7. Structure of a business requirements document

12. Validating and Managing Requirements
12.1. Types of requirements validation, formal requirements validation, activities in the Agile requirements validation process
12.2. Aspects of requirements management, traceability, change control

13. Delivering the Requirements
13.1. Types of delivery lifecycle, waterfall, “V” model, incremental, iterative (Agile)
13.2. Advantages and disadvantages of the lifecycles

14. Delivering the Business Solution
14.1. The role of the business analyst in the business change lifecycle
14.2. The role of the business analyst during the design, development and test stages
14.3. Approaches used in the implementation stage, SARAH model, business readiness assessment
14.4. Using a benefits plan in the realisation stage

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