Business Analysis Introduction: Defining Successful Projects

Overview of the business analysis discipline

• What is business analysis?
• The scope of the business analyst’s work
• Responsibilities of the business analyst

Introducing the business analysis process

• From strategy analysis to requirements engineering
• Best practices used throughout the business analysis process

Introducing strategy analysis

• Identifying strategic context
• Performing root cause analysis

Internal analysis

• Responding to business challenges through internal analysis
• Identifying your key stakeholders
• Clarifying the organisational mission using MOST

External analysis

• Optimising organisational flexibility using external analysis
• Investigating competitive pressures using Porter’s Five Forces
• Analysing the business landscape using PESTLE

Identifying your stakeholders

• The stakeholder wheel and identification matrix
• Creating stakeholder personas

Analysing your stakeholders

• Examining stakeholder impact for your project
• Evaluating stakeholder attitude towards your project
• Placing your stakeholder in the organisational hierarchy using STOP
• Developing action-oriented business initiatives to address business needs and opportunities

Managing your stakeholders

• Interacting with your stakeholders
• Creating a stakeholder communication plan
• Assessing your stakeholders

Exploring business and technical options

• Forming scope from business goals and objectives
• Writing the business requirements

Developing criteria and solutions

• Making use of affinity diagrams to elicit high-level criteria
• Comparing evaluation techniques

The structure of the business case

• Creating a pyramid of information
• Using customer-focused persuasion

Analysing costs and benefits

• Categories of costs and benefits
• Identifying tangible and intangible costs and benefits
• Investment appraisal using a cash flow forecast
• Evaluating risk and impact

Defining requirements

• The cost of poor requirements
• Distinguishing between functional and non-functional requirements
• Key sources of requirements

Planning the requirements communication process

• Addressing common pitfalls typically encountered during requirements development
• Actors in the requirements engineering process
• Dealing with tacit and explicit knowledge

Developing the requirements document

• Building the requirements list
• Applying requirements filters
• Developing well-formed requirements

The elicitation process

• Elicitation tools and techniques
• Guidelines and checklists

Eliciting the requirements

• Conducting effective interviews and workshops
• Deploying observation techniques
• Getting user feedback by using prototypes
• Analysing the situation using visualisation techniques
• Spotting non-functional requirements using quantitative analysis

Organising and prioritising requirements

• Arranging requirements by focus
• Gap analysis techniques

Employing modelling techniques

• Modelling the business context
• Shaping the business processes
• Inspecting the requirements

Creating formal requirements documentation

• Structuring a standard functional requirement
• Structuring a standard non-functional requirement

Creating agile requirements documentation

• Developing and splitting user stories
• Crafting, and elaborating on, use cases

Validating the requirements

• Stakeholders and their areas of concern
• Types of validation

Managing the written requirements

• Dealing with changing requirements
• Sources of requirements change
• Components of requirements management

• Delivering the requirements
• Transferring the business solution
• Supporting developmental activities