In this course, you will further explore the business analysis lifecycle in both waterfall and agile projects, with a focus on planning, documentation, analysis, management, and communication activities.
You will:
- Engage in up-front enterprise analysis to ensure that scope and problem statements are clear
- Build on the planning skills covered in Business Analysis Essentials to create a comprehensive business analysis plan
- Analyze the impact and influence of stakeholders to enable more effective elicitation of requirements
- Learn about how and when to use modeling techniques used in business analysis, and practice creating swimlane diagrams, use case models and descriptions, user stories, state diagrams, data dictionaries, and entity relationship diagrams
- Write effective requirements and accurately revise existing requirements to meet quality criteria
- Effectively manage the requirements to ensure accuracy, efficiency, and consistency in communication; to ensure requirements traceability, and to manage change
- Plan a review process to ensure the validity of requirements
This course is aligned with IIBA's A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOGuide) standards.
Students pursuing a university-recognized and/or accredited certificate in Canada or continuing education units in the US must attend at least 90% of class time, participate in class exercises and section-knowledge checks, and score at least 70% on an end-of-class, multiple-choice assessment.
Skills Gained
- Perform root cause analysis
- Define, write, trace, and validate, and assess the quality of the four different types of requirements according to the BABO Guide
- Validate problem statements, objectives, and scope statements
- Model requirements to identify gaps and communicate requirements using the following techniques:
- Process modeling
- Scenarios and use cases
- User stories
- State diagrams
- Data dictionary
- Entity-relationship diagrams (ERD)
- Create a comprehensive Requirements Management Plan (RMP)
- Create a business analysis plan for requirements elicitation and analysis activities (BAP)
- Identify sources for requirements and appropriate elicitation techniques
- Assemble and communicate requirements packages to various levels of stakeholder groups
- Perform requirements documentation and management activities in Agile or waterfall environments
- Assess and justify the value of a proposed change to product scope or requirements
- Elicit requirements using the observation technique
Who Can Benefit
- Junior business analyst (BA) working on small projects or on one team
- Project managers wanting to understand more about documenting requirements
- People who have several years of business analysis experience but their organizations want to standardize the process or roles
- People who are new to the business analysis role but who have several years of business experience
- Managers who want a better understanding of business requirements and documentation
- Software developers and testers
Prerequisites
There are no required prerequisite courses; however, completion of the Business Analysis Essentials course is recommended. At least one year on the job serving in a BA related role is recommended.