On this 5-day course, participants learn to use a structured, disciplined approach to understanding business systems, eliciting, analysing, documenting and validating business system requirements. Particular emphasis is placed on identifying the need for information systems within the business, and ensuring that the resulting, engineered systems provide benefit to the business in meeting defined goals and objectives.

By the end of this course you will be able to:

Plan

• Plan, conduct & follow up on a structured investigative interview


• Plan the analysis activities on a project

Produce

• Produce effective requirements documentation


• Produce a process model of an end-to-end business process


• Produce a Use Case diagram and a detailed Use Case description


• Produce an entity relationship diagram showing the relationship


• between informational elements in a business system


• Build decision trees and decision tables to represent and clarify


• business rules

Apply

• Apply a structured, disciplined approach to understanding business Systems & solving business problems


• Understand the different Stakeholder viewpoints that must be


• considered and interpreted by the analyst.


• Use Critical Appraisal techniques to refine and improve a system


• specification


• List the desirable contents of a business requirements specification

Deliver

• Prepare and Deliver a management presentation

This course is endorsed by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA™). It provides material and skills relevant to six
Business Analysis Body of Knowledge™ (BABOK™) knowledge areas as well as Underlying Competencies.

Intended for:

• Business Analyst/Systems Analyst  0-5 Years


• Experienced analyst looking for formal training.

Prerequisites:

Participants are expected to have some understanding of basic business practice, and to have been exposed to the capabilities and limitations of computer systems.

Credits:

This course will contribute 35 CDU’s (Continuing  Development Units)
towards your certificate of
Competency in Business Analysis™ (CCBA™) or Certified Business
Analysis Professional™ (CBAP®)
certification requirements.

Course Content

ROLE OF THE BUSINESS ANALYST

Course starts with a discussion of the role of Business Analyst in the context of the  systems development lifecycle, and the value brought by business analysts and
systems analysts to both a project and to an organisation.

PROJECT SCOPE AND PLANNING THE ANALYSIS

Highlighting the importance of communication through practical exercises.

A series of tools and techniques are examined for identifying and understanding
Project & Product Scope along with some tools to be used when starting analysis.

A rule of-thumb planning technique is presented for answering that difficult question “how long will this take?”

EFFECTIVE REQUIREMENTS

The value of effective requirements is discussed, looking at the different levels and types of requirements, as are some international good practice standards for
representing these requirements at a level and in a format that is appropriate to both the project and the organisation.

UNDERSTANDING THE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

The course examines the 5 “B’s” that the business analyst needs to understand in depth: Business Objectives, Business Actors, Business Events, Business Processes and Business Objects.

INVESTIGATION TECHNIQUES

The course then focuses on the practical skills a business analyst needs to effectively and efficiently conduct an analyst investigation.  A number of investigative techniques are examined:

• Planning, conducting and following up a structured interview


• Workshops and Brainstorming


• Observation


• Searching Records


• Questionnaires


• Random Sampling


• Participants are given the opportunity to apply the theory of these investigative techniques using the structured interview as the primary investigative tool

TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES FOR MODELLING THE SYSTEM

This module looks at the core modelling techniques used when identifying the
informational requirements of business systems. The following techniques are
covered, with a clear focus on why each is important when conducting analysis:

• Business process modelling


• Use Case modelling


• Entity modelling/Class diagramming


• Normalisation


• Logic tools

STRUCTURED WALKTHROUGHS AND CRITICAL APPRAISAL

The course provides an understanding of the techniques and tools needed for various types of review and walkthroughs, and introduces Critical Appraisal as an approach to ensuring the right requirements are delivered on.

DELIVERING A PRESENTATION

Analysts will frequently be called upon to deliver formal and informal presentations about the project and their investigation.  This module provides an overview of the skills needed to clearly and succinctly convey the results of their investigation and analysis and recommend the next steps in the project lifecycle.

TOOLS AND TEMPLATES

The course concludes with a set of tools and templates that assist participants in being immediately productive back in their workplace.

Methods Used

Lecturing is kept to the minimum necessary. A participatory approach is used to enable learning by discovery. The course contains a comprehensive case study that participants work through over the five days, applying all the techniques learned to build a complete understanding of the subject.

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