We take a high-level look at what it means to be a business analyst and reviews the underlying competencies of the business analyst, the key business analysis stakeholders, and the BABOK Guide requirements classification scheme.

We take you through planning the business analysis activities for your project using tasks from your first knowledge area. To achieve a controlled start to a project or project phase, you must plan what needs to be done, how to go about doing it, and who needs to be involved with the work. The business analyst’s task list for this particular knowledge area consists of the following:

• Planning the business analysis approach for the project
• Determining how to engage stakeholders, including stakeholder identification, analysis, and categorization
• Defining the business analysis governance activities for decision making Addressing business analysis information management needs
• Planning the requirements development and management process
• Managing and reporting on the business analysis effort

Strategy Analysis focuses on how the business analyst identifies the business needs driving a project by performing problem definition and analysis. The business analyst’s task list for this knowledge area includes translating business strategy into proposed new business or enterprise solutions by doing the following:

• Defining and understanding the business problem or opportunity
• Assessing capability gaps in the organization by analyzing the current and future states
• Assessing risks relative to the proposed solution
• Defining the change strategy for the initiative
• Determining the most feasible business solution approach

This focuses on ensuring that the right people are involved with developing, understanding, and approving the project requirements. Business analysts perform requirement management tasks as part of requirements development work by doing the following:

• Managing requirements traceability
• Maintaining requirements for accuracy and reuse
• Addressing requirements prioritization
• Determining how requirements should change Facilitating requirements approval

Elicitation and Collaboration defines how business analysts work with stakeholders to elicit requirements and understand stakeholder needs and concerns. This knowledge area also addresses ongoing collaboration and communication during all business analysis activities. The business analyst’s task list for this knowledge area consists of the following:

• Preparing for elicitation activities
• Meeting with stakeholders to conduct the elicitation activity
• Confirming, documenting, and recording the elicitation results
• Communicating and confirming elicitation results with key stakeholders

Takes the elicited requirements information and makes sense of it. The tasks in this knowledge area focus on analyzing the stated requirements from your elicitation efforts and building the real stakeholder or solution requirements for your project. The business analyst’s task list for this knowledge area consists of the following:

• Specifying and modeling requirements and designs
• Verifying requirements and designs
• Validating requirements and designs
• Defining the architecture and structure of requirements
• Defining solution options
• Analyzing value and recommending a solution

This BA knowledge area focuses on assessing proposed solutions, allocating requirements to solution components, and validating the solution to make sure that it will meet the business need and deliver value to the organization and its stakeholders. The business analyst’s task list for this knowledge area consists of the following:

• Defining solution performance measures
• Collecting and analyzing solution performance data
• Assessing solution limitations
• Assessing enterprise limitations
• Recommending actions to increase solution value

Visio is a tool used by business analysts to help with business modelling tasks. It is an effective technique for capturing and conveying concepts in an approachable and compelling manner. Additionally, this program is useful for creating case diagrams, data models, and project timelines or flowcharts, which are beneficial to many enterprises.

Participants are given business analysis projects/case studies that give real-world project experience and they are aided by an instructor.