The Role of the Business Analyst

Defining your role

• Comparing the BABOK^® and PMBOK^® Guide frameworks
• Pinpointing where you are in the process life cycle
• Identifying that your work can be defined as a project
• Establishing your relationship with the project manager

Making a commitment to the project

• Gathering information to get started quickly
• Determining the requirements for effective personal management

The Planning Process

Key steps of planning

• Exploring the makeup of a solid BA plan
• Creating the stakeholder communication system
• Synchronising your plan with an overall project plan

Jump-starting the process

• Formulating the right questions
• Eliciting work constraints
• Assessing impact on business

Influences on the planning process

• Juggling the triple constraint
• Development methodologies
• Stakeholder concerns

Communicating effectively

• Fostering relationships and trust
• Discovering your communication style
• Delivering your message for optimal results

Building the Work Plan

Initiating your work

• Conducting stakeholder analysis
• Determining objectives
• Defining the scope of work
• Creating a work charter for approval

Planning the tasks

• Generating a task list
• Developing the work and organisational breakdown structures
• Listing task attributes and characteristics
• Devising acceptance criteria

Constructing task dependencies

• Identifying the critical path and calculating slack with network diagrams
• Making resource and scheduling decisions using bar charts

Assigning resources

• Assessing resource requirements
• Utilising a responsibility assignment matrix

Outcomes of the planning process

• Deriving the schedule using a Gantt chart
• Calculating the budget

Creating Accurate Estimates

Estimating effort, duration and costs

• What constitutes a good estimate?
• Identifying standard estimating techniques

Key considerations that affect your estimates

• Collaborating to encourage ownership of the estimate
• Incorporating a WBS
• Accounting for time/cost trade-offs

Managing Risks

Increasing the probability of success

• Leveraging a Risk Analysis Questionnaire
• Communicating the results

Analysing potential problems

• Brainstorming adverse risks
• Adding preventive and contingent actions into your plan

Mitigating risks

• Identifying opportunities and threats
• Conducting qualitative and quantitative analysis
• Planning contingent actions

Executing the Plan

Managing stakeholder expectations

• Controlling scope creep
• Reporting progress

Addressing resistance to change

• Recognising reasons behind resistance to change
• Defusing resistance

Keeping your piece of the work on track

• Resolving problems with a risk register
• Identifying standard techniques for tracking time and money

Applying Lessons Learned for Future Work

• Evaluating project objectives
• Documenting methods for continued improvement