Business Analysis Essentials
Duration
Five Days
Overview
Business Analysts are increasingly required to extend themselves beyond their traditional role of developing and maintaining IT systems. They need the capability to understand the business strategy, use proven techniques to analyze the business area, and identify changes to business processes needed to meet internal and external challenges.
This course develops the skills needed to work with senior business and IT staff to analyze and model business activities. Delegates will learn how to investigate business problems, and how to identify and recommend appropriate creative solutions.
This is an intensive five-day course with a combination of lectures, in-class exercises, and case studies.
Additional courses in the Business Analysis series include:
- The Organizational Context
- Business Modeling Business Processes
- Requirements Engineering
- Business Systems Analysis using UML
Pre-requisites
There are no specific pre-requisites for this course.
Who Should Attend
Those wishing to acquire the skill set required for analyzing and addressing business problems.
Course Outline
General Business Analysis Rationale
Lifecycle for business change
- The role of the Business Analyst
- A comparison of the business analyst and systems analyst roles
- Purpose of analyzing and modeling business systems
- Overview of business analysis approach
Strategic Analysis in Context
- Identifying the business domain
- Internal environment analysis
- External environment analysis
- SWOT analysis
- Overview of areas of strategy including IS strategy
- PSFs and KPIs; Balanced business scorecard
Project discipline for business analysis studies
- Terms of reference/project initiation
- Business and project objectives
- Deliverables from business analysis studies
Understanding the situation/issues
- Stakeholder analysis
- Overview of investigative techniques
- Representation of the business situation
Business perspectives
- Identifying different perspectives
- Defining business perspectives
- Identifying and resolving conflicts
Analyzing and modeling business activities
- Identifying activities and dependencies
- Building a business activity mode;
- Business events/activity triggers
- Business rules/constraints
Identifying potential solutions
- Gap analysis - comparing the ideal and existing systems
- Defining a new business model
- Identifying IS/IT requirements to support the new business model
Making the business case
- Structure of a business case
- Identifying options for business change
- Costs and Benefits analysis
- Impact analysis
- Risk analysis and management
- Presenting a business case
Accepting the Business Case
- Testing the system for user acceptance
- Managing the implementation of change
- Realizing business benefits
Case Study
- A case study allows the delegates to undertake a simulated business analysis assignment
Skills Developed
- Describe how a business strategy is developed
- Use strategic analysis techniques
- Describe the need for project discipline.
- Explain techniques to investigate an organization'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 modeling 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
- Use investment appraisal techniques
- Explain the derivation of IT requirements from the definitions of business improvements
- Explain the importance of assuring the business case once the changes have been implemented
