• Business Analysis – Foundation
• Business Analysis – Practitioner
• Agile In A Day
• Modelling Business Processes
• Requirements Engineering
• Understanding Corporate IT

Mon/Tue – BA Foundation £795

Wed – Agile Methodology £395

Thu/Fri – BA Practitioner £795

Glasgow/Edinburgh/Newcastle/Manchester/Leeds/London/Bristol + one week off – 8 week cycles

Payment due on booking, 10 days notice required for cancellation or no refunds

Private Training

Audience

Prerequisites

Duration

Course Objectives

• The role and competencies of a business analyst.
• Strategy analysis.
• Business system and business process modeling.
• Stakeholder analysis.
• Investigation and modelling techniques.
• Requirements engineering.
• Business case development.
• Management of business change.

Course Content

• The origins of business analysis.
• The development of business analysis.
• The scope of business analysis work.
• Taking an holistic approach.
• The role and responsibilities of a business analyst.

• Behavioural skills and personal qualities.
• Business knowledge.
• Techniques.
• The development of competencies.

• The context for strategy.
• The definition of strategy.
• Strategy development.
• External environment analysis – PESTLE and Porter's 5-Forces model.
• Internal environment analysis – MOST, Resource Audit and Boston Box.
• SWOT
• Executing strategy – McKinsey 7-S Model, the Balanced Business Scorecard, critical success factors, key performance indicators

• An approach to problem-solving.
• Stages of the business analysis process model.
• Objectives of the process model stages.
• Procedure for each process model stage.
• Techniques used within each process model stage.

• Interviews.
• Workshops.
• Observation.
• Scenarios.
• Prototyping.
• Quantitative approaches.
• Documenting the current business situation.

• Stakeholder categories and identification.
• Analysing stakeholders.
• Stakeholder management strategies.
• Managing stakeholders.
• Understanding stakeholder perspectives.
• Business activity models.

• Organisational context.
• An alternative view of an organisation.
• The organisational view of business processes.
• Value propositions.
• Process models.
• Analysing the as-is business process model.
• Improving business processes (to-be business process).

• Gap analysis.
• Introduction to business architecture.
• Definition of business architecture.
• Business Architecture techniques.

• Identifying options.
• Assessing project feasibility – Business, Technical and Financial feasibility.
• Structure of a business case.
• Investment appraisal - Payback, Discounted Cash Flow and Internal rate of return.

• A framework for requirements engineering.
• Actors in requirements engineering.
• Requirements elicitation.
• Requirements analysis.
• Validating requirements.

• The requirements document.
• The requirements catalogue.
• Managing requirements.

• Modelling system functions – use case diagrams.
• Modelling system data - entity relationship diagrams, class models.

• Delivering the Solution.
• Context.
• Lifecycles - waterfall, V model, incremental, iterative.

• BA role in the business change lifecycle.
• Design stage.
• Implementation stage.
• Realisation stage.

Audience

Prerequisites

Duration

Course Objectives

• Describe how a business strategy is developed.
• Apply strategic analysis techniques.
• Explain the need for project discipline.
• Explain techniques to investigate an organisation's business systems.
• Describe an approach to improving business systems.
• Explain the importance of stakeholder management and use a stakeholder analysis technique.
• Use techniques for the analysis and conceptual modelling of business systems.
• Describe how recommendations for business improvement may be identified.
• Describe the contents of a rigorous business case for the development and implementation of business changes.
• Identify costs, benefits, impacts and risks for an option in a business case.

Course Content

• A lifecycle for business change – alignment, definition, design, implementation and realisation.
• The role of the Business Analyst within the lifecycle for business change.
• Other roles within the lifecycle for business change.
• The framework for business analysis activities.

• Internal environment analysis.
• External environment analysis.
• SWOT analysis.
• Critical Success Factors and Key Performance Indicators and Performance Targets.
• The Balanced Business Scorecard as a framework for identifying Critical Success Factors and Key Performance Indicators.

• Terms of Reference/Project Initiation.
• Business and project objectives.

• Stakeholder identification.
• Overview of investigative techniques.
• Representing a holistic view of the business situation.

• Stakeholder analysis.
• Identifying different perspectives.
• Defining perspectives.

• Developing a conceptual business activity model from a perspective.
• Identifying activities.
• Identifying dependencies.

• External.
• Internal.
• Time-based.

• External constraints.
• Internal policies.
• Internal procedures.
• Building consensus by resolving conflicts.

• Gap analysis – comparing the ideal and existing systems.
• Defining a new business model.
• Identifying IS/IT requirements to support the new business model.

• Structure of a business case.
• Identifying and shortlisting options for business change.
• Identifying and categorising costs and benefits.
• Identifying and categorising risks and approaches to their management.
• Identifying impacts.
• The lifecycle for the business case.

Audience

Prerequisites

Duration

Course Objectives

• Understand the principles of agile approaches to development and their advantages over traditional methods.
• Recognise the constituent parts of Scrum and the roles involved.
• Have a general understanding of agile planning and estimating.
• Be able to contribute to selecting and implementing an agile approach.

Course Content

• Problems with traditional approaches.
• The Agile Manifesto.
• Agile Manifesto Principles.
• A generic agile approach to projects.
• Lifecycle of product development.
• Project constraints in traditional and agile development.
• Benefits of agile.

• Scrum approach to development.
• Scrum Roles - Scrum Master, Product Owner, Development Team.
• Customers and Stakeholders.
• Product Backlog.
• Sprints.
• Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives and Daily Scrums.

• Levels of planning in agile.
• Responding to change.
• Release and iteration planning.
• Backlog prioritisation.
• Backlog grooming.

• What are user stories?
• Acceptance criteria.
• Defining Done.
• Advantages of user stories.
• Problems in estimating, the cone of uncertainty.
• Estimating size with story points.
• Estimation scales.
• Velocity.
• Planning Poker.

• History of agile.
• eXtreme Programming (XP).
• Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM Atern).
• Lean Software Development.
• Kanban.

• Selecting an agile approach.
• Using pilot projects.
• Steps in implementing agile across an organisation.
• Scaling agile.