Business Analysis Boot Camp
Business analysts and product owners serve the end user, customer or stakeholders of a project, system or product. They are also responsible for ensuring that the right requirements are identified and realized. Both roles have the power to delight customers and increase bottom-line profits. They are responsible for stakeholder analysis, elicitation of requirements tied to business goals, solution design and translation of requirements into instructions for technical team members. Most often, the success of a project rests on the competency of the team’s business analyst and/or product owners.
In this course, you gain proven techniques and build competencies used throughout the requirements lifecycle. You learn how to uncover true project requirements that align with your organization’s goals. You practice clearly articulating requirements to both the customer and technical teams in a way that allows the team to build customer-pleasing systems and products with built-in quality. Since most organizations today work within a hybrid model, this course considers Agile as well as traditional Waterfall tools, techniques and environments.
Who Should Attend
Individuals new to the role of business analyst or considering transferring into the role of business analyst as well as those seeking to establish best practices in their organizations.
Benefits and Learning Outcomes
- Describe the role of the business analyst and product owner
- Recognize soft skills required for a successful business analyst/product owner
- Analyze stakeholders and create user personas
- Evaluate current state and describe desired future state
- Discover requirements consistent with user, stakeholder and organizational goals
- Formulate effective requirements
- Validate and verify requirements
- Estimate requirements effort/size
- Prioritize requirements
Course Outline/Topics
Foundations
- Role of the business analyst, product owner and combination roles
- Development environments: Traditional/Waterfall, Agile, the real world
- Business analyst tools, techniques and skills: Soft skills
- Business analyst tools, techniques and skills: Quantitative skills
Eliciting Requirements – Discovering the Requirement Behind the Requirement
- Stakeholders and user personas
- Current and future states
- Techniques for eliciting requirements: Interviews, documentation review, user observation, group brainstorming, competitive analysis
- Solution design
- Building in quality; minimizing rework
- Requirement estimation and prioritization: Determining what to include in product/product – buy a feature, Scrum poker
Writing and Communicating Requirements
- What is a requirement? What is a user story?
- Types of requirements
- Requirement attributes
- Requirement communication
- Requirement quality
- Requirement prioritization – while actively working the product
- Validation and verification
Testimonials
"Sally was great – [she] offered practical examples and talked through a variety of scenarios to help us put our new tools to use. Well laid out and comprehensive. Gave me a good start to help organize my current projects." — Participant, April 2022
"Great course and refresher for experienced analysts. We learned how different templates of documents could be applied in the real world. The course was more interactive than I had expected, which made it so much better in my opinion. I enjoyed this course …. Sally is a great and personable instructor who brings a lot of value to this course. She brings both real-world and made-up examples that can be applied in the course. She tries to get all participants to engage which is awesome." — Participant, April 2022
"Sally was awesome!" — Erik Schroeder, RW Baird, April 2022
Dates and locations to be announced.
