This course focuses on eliciting and documenting requirements, roles and responsibilities and many topics that will enhance the skills of a Business Analyst including the introduction of Use Cases. The classes will be a combination of lecture and exercises to enhance the learning experience and will be based on the customer process and templates if available. A case study will be provided, or attendees may be asked to bring information on current projects or most recently completed projects to use for exercises. The topics to be covered each day are:

Day 1 – Getting Started

• Introductions
• Business analysis and requirements - Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) terms and definitions
• Roles and responsibilities - necessary BA fundamental skills
• Exercise - self evaluation - how do your skills match up?
• Discussion - BA/BSA roles at Wellpoint. How are they similar or different from each other or those in other Companies?
• Habits of effective analysts
• Defining project scope (from the BA perspective)
• Describing the business situation and business case
• Documenting the business situation - The Business & Technical Requirements Document
• Exercise - text description and context diagram
• Customer involvement - finding their voice
• Gathering data – techniques
• Determining planning considerations
• Selecting requirements activities
• Estimating requirements activities
• Exercise - developing the requirements plan - what to ask, how to gather data, etc.
• Planning the Kick-Off Meeting (recommended if working on a large project)
• Exercise - developing the agenda
• Summary of Day 1

Day 2 – Gathering and documenting Requirements

• Review of Day 1
• Sources of requirements - business and technical
• Requirements elicitation techniques
• Discussion - How do business and technical requirements differ?
• Characteristics of quality requirements statements
• Analyzing and documenting requirements
• Understanding requirements - Use Case approach
• Exercise - Identifying Use Cases
• Exercise/discussion session - requirements problems in their projects
• Levels of requirements (high, detailed, technical) aka Business, User, Technical
• Exercise - writing requirements in the appropriate format - completing the Business and Technical Requirements Document
• Characteristics of quality requirements specifications
• Prioritizing requirements - Critical, Important, Useful
• Guidelines for writing quality requirements
• Examining requirements for clarity
• Exercise - review and rewrite requirements
• Validating and verifying requirements - technical reviews, peer reviews, inspections, cross-validation

Day 3 – Optimizing Performance

• Review of Day 2
• Project Champions - what to request and expect
• How do you know when you’re done?
• Finding missing requirements - exercise
• Traps to avoid
• Tools and Techniques Review – other modeling techniques
• Managing requirements scope and change – goals and practices
• Exercise - designing a requirements change control process
• Requirements Traceability
• Exercise - Discussion on how to apply solutions to the requirements problems identified in Day 2
• The “Art” versus the “Science” of Business Analysis - soft skills – communication, leadership, problem solving/conflict management
• Summary of Best Practices and key points

For a printable pdf of Business Analysis Best Practices - Introducing Use Cases, click here.

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