At the end of this Business Analysis training course, you will be able to:

• Perform external and internal analysis to understand the pressures on the business and root cause of a problem
• Write clear requirements for formal and Agile projects
• Create UML models and diagrams to analyse requirements
• Perform strategy analysis to understand your organisation’s business landscape
• Develop user stories and use cases

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