Business Analyst's Crash Course

2 days

No prerequisite necessary.

An intensive practical course covering all aspects of the Business Analyst role – from requirements gathering to testing. The emphasis of the course is on learning practical tools and techniques that can immediately be put to use. All major techniques – both Structured and Object-Oriented (OO) – are addressed. Each trainee receives a hard copy of all course material as well as a Job Aids booklet, containing useful templates, examples, guidelines and glossary for use back on the job. NEW!! Supports the most up-to-date standards and guidelines in the industry: BABOK 2, ITIL V3 and UML 2.2

WHY

Most large companies and organizations that rely heavily on software for business operations, employ Business Analysts to communicate business needs to software developers. When analysts do not do their job effectively, the result is incomplete or incorrect requirements - leading causes of spiraling development costs and project delays.

In the Crash Course, you’ll learn how to cut costs and delays by improving communication between business stakeholders and developers through comprehensive requirements analysis and documentation and by guaranteeing results through structured testing and quality assurance.

What makes this course stand out from the competition?

1. Value for money: No course on the market offers this amount of content in so little time. How can we do this? By removing all of the “fat” traditionally found in BA courses.
2. Tool-focused: This course focuses on the tools and techniques used by the BA to perform the role. Unlike in other introductory courses, you won't waste time learning generalities; you'll actually learn how to use the key BA techniques so you can hit the ground running.
3. Scenario-based training: One integrated, case study, based on real systems, is used throughout the course to provide a consistent and realistic context for learning.
4. Experience: Our course is written and delivered by professionals with extensive practical experience in business analysis.
5. BABOK 2 alignment: Our course aligned with BABOK 2 – the Business Analyst Book of Knowledge published by the IIBA. It has been developed by BABOK reviewers and is aligned with BABOK 2 knowledge areas, tools and techniques.
6. Supports ITIL V3: ITIL is the word’s most widely used set of guidelines for IT Service Management. The Noble Crash Course is the only course to that supports and maps to ITIL V3.
7. UML 2.2: The course is compliant with the latest version of the UML (Unified Modeling Language – the state-of-the-art standard for modeling real-world and IT systems.
8. CBAP accreditation: The Crash course has been reviewed and certified by the IIBA and is eligible for 14 credits towards CBAP (Certified BA Professional) accreditation.

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:

• • Improve the quality of interviews with users using techniques that guide you through the process, showing you what questions to ask and when.
• • Conduct requirements-workshop sessions (facilitated meetings) for capturing and verifying requirements, using state-of-the-art interviewing techniques – including use-cases and Object Oriented Analysis.
• • Write a comprehensive and unambiguous Business Requirements Document, communicating the needs of the business to users and to the technical team.
• • Use UML 2 – the current industry OO standard – in preparing business requirements and diagrams.
• • Create requirements documentation that can be used as the basis for customized development, maintenance of existing systems and/or as selection criteria for off-the-shelf software.
• • Gather business requirements using traditional Structured Analysis and Object-Oriented Analysis (OOA).
• • Describe complex business logic and ensure completeness of testing using Decision Tables.
• • Understand basic concepts of iterative development.
• • Document user requirements with use-cases.
• • Understand the BA role with respect to Quality Assurance and be able to facilitate Structured Walkthroughs in order to test the requirements.
• • Understand the BA role in supporting the Project Manager on iterative, incremental IT projects.

BABOK 2 Alignment

This course addresses the following BABOK knowledge areas and tasks:

Elicitation

The course provides guidance and hands-on experience in structuring the interview and supplies lists of questions for elicitation events over the lifecycle.

Requirements Management and Communication

The course provides guidance and hands-on experience in maintaining requirements for reuse by using the structural (data) model and decision tables to centralize business rules and provides guidelines and experience reviewing requirements using Structured Walkthroughs.

Enterprise Analysis

The course provides guidance and hands-on experience in assessing capability gaps using workflow modeling and defining solution scope using System Use-Cases. The course provides guidance in the following techniques used in the Enterprise Architecture, an important input to this KA: business process workflow models, Decision Tables, ERDs and Class Diagrams.

Requirements Analysis

The course provides guidance and hands-on experience in mapping the dynamic and structural models to each other and in specifying and modeling requirements by defining user classes (actors), business concepts and relationships. The following techniques listed in the BABOK for this KA are covered: Business Rules Analysis (Decision Tables); Data Modeling (ERDs and class diagrams); Process Modeling; Scenarios and Use-Cases; State Diagrams. Guidance is also provided in requirements verification using Structured Walkthroughs.

Solution Assessment and Validation

The course provides guidance in designing tests to assess deployed solutions that ensure adequate test coverage and in testing non-functional (service level) requirements using System Tests. The following techniques listed in the BABOK for this KA are covered: Business Rules Analysis (for rules that may be managed through the software solution); Decision Tables; Process Modeling (for allocation of and progressive implementation of activities and subprocesses).

• Entry-level IT Business Analysts and their managers

• Self-taught IT Business Analysts requiring a course that fills in the gaps and puts all the pieces together

• Systems Analysts and programmers interested in expanding their role into the business area.

The course content is presented through:

• an integrated case study based on a real-life system

• lectures

• one-on-one assistance during the workshop portion of the course

Brainstorming JAD (Joint Application Design) Business data modeling Entity Relationship Diagrams Use cases: textual documentation and diagrams Work Flow Breakdown and Analysis Activity Diagrams Data Flow Diagrams and Process Decomposition Decision Tables for Requirements Documentation and Testing Structured Testing principles and methods Structured Walkthroughs for QA Black Box requirements-based testing including boundary value analysis Systems testing (Regression, volume, stress, usability, performance tests) Mapping Business Analysis tools to project development phases for: Waterfall methodologies Iterative methodologies Managing Requirements Structural Object-Oriented (OO) tools for the Business Analyst, using UML 2 Class diagrams Mapping ITIL V3 to the BA role Daily Schedule Day 1 Lesson 1: The BA Role and Requirements Elicitation Lesson 2: Analyzing Requirements with Use Cases Lunch Lesson 3: Analyzing Workflow and Complex Requirements Lesson 4: Documenting Process Requirements using Structured Analysis Day 2 Lesson 5: Analyzing Business Rules using Data Modeling Lesson 6: Analyzing Business Rules using Structural Object-Oriented Modeling (Class Diagrams) Lunch Lesson 7: The BA Role in Testing Lesson 8: Project and IT Service Management for the BA (with iTIL V3) On-site requirements: Room set-up: Set up tables (e.g., round tables) so that trainees are sitting in groups of 3-5. Each group should have 1 flipchart. Each trainee requires 1 pad or paper + pen + 1 copy of the course material. The course material comes in one binder and contains: Detailed course notes (printed PowerPoint presentation) Workshop and Job Aids (Word document) with: Full workshop solutions Job Aids booklet containing: Templates Examples Glossary of technical terms For the instructor: Whiteboard Overhead screen projector or large colour monitor, connected to instructor’s PC PC with: Microsoft Office, PowerPoint presentation, Workshop and Job Aids file (1 Word doc).