The Business Analyst’s Crash CourseTM: The Essential BA Toolkit [with BABOK 2]

Course #: BA001

Duration:            2 days (14 CDUs)

Description:

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 ACRA/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.

Audience:                       

•     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.

Prerequisites: none           

Class Format:

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

Objectives:

High-level objectives

·       For the new BA:

o   Gain hands-on experience in using essential business analysis tools

o   Create requirements documentation that can be used as the basis for customized development, maintenance of existing systems or as selection criteria for off-the-shelf software

·       For the experienced BA:

o   Upgrade your tool usage to the latest standards and best practices: UML 2.2, BABOK 2 and ITIL V3  - the world’s most widely used set of guidelines for IT Service Management.

o   Understand how all of the essential BA tools fit together in the performance of the BA role

Detailed objectives

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

•     Conduct effective requirements-workshop sessions (facilitated meetings) for capturing and verifying requirements.

•     Learn how and when to ask the right questions during requirements elicitation events.

•     Create quality requirements documentation for that is comprehensive, unambiguous and promotes consistency and reuse.

•     Elicit and document user requirements with use cases.

•     Model business process workflow and user interactions with UML 2.2 activity diagrams.

•     Capture and document complex business rules using decision tables.

•     Interpret Structured Analysis Data Flow Diagram (DFD) models.

•     Use Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) and UML Class Diagrams during interviews as effective tools for uncovering elusive business rules - which, when not discovered during elicitation, can be extremely expensive to implement.

•     Learn how to convert Class Diagrams to ERDs and stakeholder-friendly textual business rules documentation

•     Support the QA process by reviewing and ensuring the quality of the test strategy, test scenarios and test data using Structured Testing, Structured Walkthroughs, decision tables, use-case scenario testing and boundary-value analysis.

•     Support the PM in managing requirements and planning a requirements-elaboration approach in the context of 2 of the major approaches to IT Project Management: Waterfall and Iterative-Incremental Development (a major aspect of agile processes).

Content:

•     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).

BABOK 2 Alignment:

This course addresses the following BABOK knowledge areas and tasks.