To stay competitive in today’s fast paced economy, companies need to deliver innovations that meet business or market needs without spending time on the wrong problem or rework for missed requirements. This foundational course provides students, regardless of their title, the essential business analyst skills necessary to identify the best solutions and realize significant value on their projects. It supports the IIBA BABOK industry standards and PMI’s PBA certification.

Business Analyst Skills

This course explores the breadth of business analyst skills, tasks and interactions expected in a professional role. It provides a complete foundational set of practical tips and hands on exercises to build expertise and confidence using requirements delivery strategies, independent of methodology.

Classroom Experience

Highly interactive exercises provide students opportunities to practice and reinforce techniques during class. Regardless of the participant’s skill level, the workshop cases and discussions inspire learning insights for every level of experience. This is an excellent course to be held onsite at your organization to level set analysts across the organization. It provides consistent terminology, project participant roles, templates, and suggested standards for an organization to use as a starting point to add their unique customizations.

Students are encouraged to bring projects into class for exercises and to develop a more personalized post-class action plan to take their project to the next step. This class also includes our Make Learning Stick program to ensure the knowledge gained in class is converted to long term memory.

Learning Objectives

• Define business analysis and requirements
• Elicit requirements from stakeholders using a variety of effective techniques
• Practice creative thinking skills to engage stakeholders, uncover needs, and identify new approaches and ideas
• Compare and contrast analysis techniques in order to select the technique(s) that will most appropriately:
  • support your understanding, critical thinking and problem solving
  • communicate information to stakeholders to enable review and their understanding of requirements
• Reduce confusion and development errors by creating excellent requirements that can be easily understood by outsourced or distributed teams
• Get the most out of your models and diagrams by asking the right questions during analysis
• Identify why the project is being done (business drivers) in order to ensure the right analysis effort is being performed and so that requirements efforts can be appropriately prioritized
• Create a context data flow diagram to identify interfaces, data flows, and high-level processes associated with the project, that is valuable both for planning and communications purposes
• Discuss strategies for content organization and collaboration, and describe why being more organized increases team agility
• Practice creating an analysis approach to make the most efficient use of elicitation and analysis techniques
• Learn to address common barriers that face project teams

This course can also be taken as individual days:

1. Requirements Elicitation and Review

2. Scope Your Area of Analysis

3. Requirements Analysis Techniques

4. Applying Business Analysis

We also offer our Essential Skills for Business Analysis course in an instructor-led virtual learning environment. This is possible via highly interactive Adobe® Connect classrooms. The virtual environment allows students the opportunity to collaborate with other students and receive instructor feedback in breakout sessions.

Agile teams realize that analysis is still an essential part of project work and a key to ensuring that they are working on the right solution. Analysis skills contribute to the team by facilitating the collaboration, creating user stories, refining the backlog, getting buy-in on priorities and ultimately the acceptance of the value delivered. Agile analysis is a team sport and the pieces can be performed by many team members. Does your team have an adequate agile analysis toolbox?

The purpose of this course is to cover the recommended agile analysis skills and techniques to be applied in an agile environment. Various techniques will be covered to support these activities with a focus on how to use the techniques, as well as how to use critical thinking to determine when to use each technique. The course provides practical guidance on handling complex projects and the many spontaneous scenarios that occur on an agile project. Our material covers many variations of agile so that these agile analysis techniques to different types of projects, different types of agile teams, and even a variety of agile frameworks.

Agile Analysis Boot Camp Classroom Experience

Interactive workshops allow students to practice the techniques as they learn. Students will be given an end to end pragmatic approach of how to apply analysis to help prevent disconnects and disruptions that can impact the team’s productivity, their velocity and performance. During the course we will demonstrate how analysis will help the team determine what is ready, what is done, and what is just enough documentation for a user story. Students will determine how to sequence user stories for sprints and identify upstream and downstream impacts.

This course includes many of the concepts found in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as well as Scrum and Kanban. This course supports the standards outlined in the IIBA BABOK® Guide V3. This course will also touch upon alternate agile approaches (XP, Iterative, DAD, Hybrids such as Scrumban, Scrumfall and other Organic approaches) to allow those pursuing agile to consider all of the practices and options.

Pre- and Post-Class Reinforcement

There is a short prerequisite quiz for students to help tailor the learning process. To ensure the knowledge gained during class is transferred to actionable plans, we include an optional comprehensive quiz after class and our Make Learning Stick program. Students are encouraged to bring projects into class for exercises and to develop a more personalized post-class action plan to take their project to the next step.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how the different agile environments impact roles, planning, and ceremonies
• Review the top down hierarchy of managing value
• Align analysis techniques with each stage and step in the agile framework
• Understand how to best facilitate communication among the agile team (i.e. the product owner, domain stakeholders, the development team)
• Perform team skills gap analysis by establishing how the analysis works with the team and scrum master roles to help the team become even more effective and responsive to changes
• Develop user stories, the 3Cs, features, epics, and supporting content (acceptance test, examples, models) for the purposes of building of the right solution and tracing value
• Discuss other types of backlog items including non-functional requirements, spikes, technical debt, and impediments
• Elicit and communicate the appropriate level of requirement detail and how to use “just in time” practices for delivering the details
• Outline the role analysis plays in managing, estimating and prioritizing the backlog, design, build and testing activities
• Identify and negotiate the factors associated with ready and done
• Practice Scrum, release and iteration/sprint planning sessions through mock exercises
• Identify supporting artifacts and determine when to introduce them
• Effectively establish a triage approach to manage the flow of changes that is encouraged and to insure ongoing backlog grooming
• Determine how an analyst is to scale their practices and techniques due to the changing needs of the team

IIBA Endorsed Curriculum

Description:
An intensive course covering all aspects of the Business Analyst role – from requirements gathering to testing. All major techniques – both Structured and Object-Oriented (OO) – are addressed in this course. 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.

Trainees facilitate requirements-gathering sessions and document the results over the course of a case-study project with an emphasis on the textual aspects of the documentation. Trainees learn state-of-the-art practices for gathering and documenting requirements based on the use case approach. The course covers what the facilitator needs to accomplish in each requirements-gathering session (goals, agenda, who to invite, artifacts, etc.) as the project progresses – starting from business use-case sessions that focus on the business context through to those that focus on user-IT interactions. Trainees also learn advanced techniques (extension, generalized and inclusion use cases) that result in requirements documentation that is easy to revise when business rules change. 

The course follows today’s most widely accepted method of requirements capture – the popular ‘use case’ approach. The clear style and organization of use cases makes them well-suited as a source of test cases and for communicating with both business stakeholders and developers. In addition, use cases are a central aspect of iterative development methodologies such as IBM’s RUP and Microsoft’s MSF.(Note: The course may be delivered with the use of the popular modeling tool, IBM Rational ROSE, when requested by the client.)

Soft Skills Training Overview

Soft skills, sometimes referred to as “professional skills”, are the essential enablers of business analysis - independent of technical or industry specific skills and knowledge.

Soft skills are extremely valuable to any organization - and are often in short supply.

Stakeholders at every level of the organization rely on thorough, objective, accurate business analysis and the resulting business requirements and supporting business cases for decisions regarding changes in business processes and business systems.

A standardized consistently applied best-practice approach for the elicitation of requirements, the application of critical thinking to analysis and development and communication of effective business cases is essential to decision making. Unfortunately, sub-optimal decisions and missed (or misaligned) opportunities are far too frequent.

Soft Skills for business and I.T. Professionals results in better, faster business and IT decisions – with increased agility that balances the allocation of time, budget, talent and risk among alternatives and with competing opportunities and priorities.

Inteq’s Soft Skills training provides business and IT professionals with the elicitation, critical thinking, decision making, business case and communication skills, techniques and methods to engage stakeholders at all levels across the enterprise.

The concepts and content of this course is based on years of best practices gleaned from thousands of business analysis interactions across the spectrum of industries and subject matter domains across the commercial and public sectors. It’s your roadmap for developing enterprise-level professional skills.

Why are soft skills so valuable?

• Business is increasingly complex, rapidly changing and chaotic. Getting "buy in" and support from a
   wide range of stakeholders is critical.

• Organizations are lean. No one seems to know "the business" - only pieces.

• Access to knowledgeable subject matter experts is increasingly difficult.

• Projects often span multiple business areas with different, sometimes conflicting, business practices –
   often resulting in an endless chain of references to "someone who knows".

• Business is fast paced. Everyone needs a solution “now”!

• There never seems to be enough time to get it right. However, there is little tolerance for getting it wrong.

Inteq's Soft Skills is a highly interactive high-energy training program. It’s specifically designed to enable you and your organization to succeed in today's rapidly changing, complex chaotic business environment.

Inteq's Soft Skills training course has emerged as the gold standard for professional-level business analysis training - and is simply the most effective soft skills training available in the industry.
 
Inteq's Soft Skills training is more than education; it's transformation - for the participants, project teams and their organizations.

That’s why over 300,000 business and IT professionals worldwide choose Inteq's business analysis training courses - Including Inteq's Soft Skills training course.

Key Skills & Techniques that You Will Learn:

• Clearly define business problems and related opportunities
• Proven techniques for discovering and mining deep business knowledge
• Facilitation and elicitation techniques that enable you to fully engage subject matter experts
• Critical thinking skills to clearly define and rapidly resolve business questions
• Develop, validate and clearly communicate effective business cases
• Navigate the political and cultural roadblocks that impede high quality analysis
• Respond rather that react to problems
• Proven techniques for generating and evaluating ideas
• Rapidly make effective critical decisions
• … and much more

Advanced Data Modeling Training Overview

Inteq’s Advanced Data Modeling training course provides participants with the deep knowledge, critical thinking skills and experienced judgment to successfully engage cross-enterprise business rules and requirements.

The concept of “engaging” business rules and requirements transcends the three core concepts of analysis – identification, analysis and specification of business rules and requirements (all of which are essential building blocks of enterprise analysis).

Inteq's Advanced Data Modeling training course enables participants to move beyond project specific rules and requirements to abstracting and generalizing the rules and requirements to enable cross-enterprise solutions.

This requires highly evolved critical thinking skills to understand the essence of business rules and requirements; and requires sophisticated judgment to discern and make essential distinctions between unique localized (departmental, project specific) rules and requirements and the requirements applicable across the enterprise.

“Engagement” requires the translation of the rules and requirements into logical data structures at the right level of abstractions to enable flexible, extensive, robust solutions that can rapidly adapt as business rules and requirements continually change.

Inteq’s Advanced Data Modeling training course is about business analysis to support enterprise business solutions - not about the nuances of a specific physical database design.

Advanced Data Modeling’s concepts apply across a wide range of initiatives from modernization of existing systems, development of new systems, implementation of vendor ERP solutions and business process reengineering.

The concepts in this course are based on years of best practices gleaned from the spectrum of industries and subject matter domains across commercial and public sectors. It’s your roadmap for engaging cross-enterprise business rules enabling enterprise-level solutions.

Key Advanced Data Modeling Techniques that You Will Learn:

• Data patterns that enable you to quickly recognize and accurately analyze complex
   cross-enterprise data oriented business rules and validate complex requirements.
• Generalization and abstraction techniques that enable flexible data structures
   that adapt to rapidly changing business rules and business requirements.
• To review and validate enterprise data models using a comprehensive and effective
   data model quality assurance approach.
• Best practice approaches to standardizing modeling components, meta-data
   and naming conventions across the enterprise.
• To identify and analyze the impact of normalization anomalies.
• To analyze the impact of data model abstraction on physical database design
   and systems development approaches.
• ... and much more.

In today’s fast moving, highly competitive, complex business environment organizations can no longer afford the costly mistakes, operational inefficiencies and lost opportunities that result from taking a myopic project level rather than a cross enterprise perspective.

Inteq’s Advanced Data Modeling training course transforms analysts into high-impact professionals; professionals that connect and engage with business people, uncover and rapidly assimilate deep business knowledge, and critically analyze and transform that knowledge into thorough, precise unambiguous business and user requirements.

Inteq training has emerged as the gold standard for professional business systems analysis training - and are simply the most effective training programs available in the industry.

Inteq training is more than education; its transformation - for the participants, project teams and their organizations.

That’s why over 300,000 business systems analysis professionals worldwide choose Inteq training programs.