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Building Your Playbook for Success
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Successful software projects rely on good business analysis to deliver the right software for the business. Organizations need people on their development projects who can make that happen by defining clear and unambiguous requirements and helping steer projects to deliver systems that customers need and value.
Business analysis—and the good requirements that result—is increasingly more important for both strategic planning and tactical product delivery. Business analysts and everyone who works on requirements need multiple skills: strategic thinking, enterprise analysis, requirements modeling, requirements elicitation and communication, business architecture and user experience, and customer relationship management.
In this two-day workshop you will:
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Understand how to incorporate strategic analysis into your projects to ensure that you are identifying the right solution to the right problem |
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Learn essential practices for requirements modeling, specification, and validation |
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Discover pragmatic techniques for understanding your users and their needs—from the outside in |
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Increase your self-awareness and communication competencies to improve customer collaboration |
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Explore ways to adapt traditional business analysis practices in the agile environment |
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Find ways to increase business analysis competencies within your organization |
After the workshop, continue your learning at the conference on Wednesday and Thursday by choosing from concurrent classes tailored to your business analysis and requirements needs.
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People come into the practice of business analysis from different places. You may be a product manager defining and delivering commercial products. You may work inside an organization delivering IT solutions. You may work on a traditional team, an agile team, or be in the midst of implementing agile practices. Perhaps your team has designated roles such as business analyst, requirements engineer, product manager, or product owner. Regardless of how you come to the job, all competent analysts need grounding in core professional skills and competencies in requirements development and business analysis.
The two-day Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop focuses on the knowledge and skills you need to help make your business analysis and requirements work successful. Led in a highly interactive, engaging style and guided by experts with extensive experience and a passion for business analysis, this workshop provides you with practical takeaways you can use immediately.
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The Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop is appropriate for anyone involved in business analysis: business analysts, systems analysts, requirements analysts, business managers, project managers, developers, product owners, test analysts, user experience analysts, ScrumMasters, and internal consultants.
Attendance at this workshop includes the following:
• 60-day access to eFoundation for Requirements Development and Management ($499 value)
• By taking the on-line eFoundation for Requirements Development and Management, you can earn 24 CDUs (Continuing Development Units toward the IIBA™)
Jennifer Brownson, Ellen Gottesdiener, Debra Lavell, Kent McDonald
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Jennifer Brownson, Ellen Gottesdiener, Debra Lavell, and Kent McDonald
Business analysts and requirements engineers need a diverse toolkit of knowledge, skills, and practices—a personal playbook—to help them steer projects to deliver valuable solutions. In this kickoff ofour two-day workshop, your presenters share new and interesting research while highlighting skills and practices that will enrich your personal analysis and requirements playbook. Through multiple “lightning talks” you’ll start your learning experience, engage with your colleagues, and prepare yourself for two enlightening days at the Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop.
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Ellen Gottesdiener
Do you struggle to identify the right requirements to deliver? Do you fumble as you try to filter voluminous product “wants” and “needs?” Are you doubtful about decisions based on incomplete requirements? Are you trying to cope with customer collaboration conundrums? You’re not alone. The good news is that there are some really “good” practices for requirements development and management—and they do matter. After all, requirements are the foundation for product development and quality—and ultimately customer value. Ellen Gottesdiener shares a wide spectrum of requirements practices she’s employed, management tools she’s used, and adaptation strategies that have worked for others. Whether your team uses traditional, agile, or a hybrid development approach, you’ll leave with a host of new ideas about the right requirements practices for your project and, more importantly, about identifying and delivering the right requirements for the business.
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Jennifer Brownson
You’ve heard it before. “Agile doesn’t scale to large projects.” “Agile won’t work at our company.” “Agile doesn’t actually work in the real world.” Not so. One day Jennifer Brownson’s traditional Fortune 500 company decided to remake itself into a completely agile organization. Join Jennifer to learn how companies can—and do—successfully make the leap to become an agile enterprise, and how the role of the business analyst is impacted. Discover how the adoption of agile practices brought requirements and process changes to all parts of the company—back office, product management, sales, IT, and customer support. As a business analyst, learn what shifts you can expect as different functions within the company learn how to work in an agile way and how you can apply these techniques to your own organization to become a change leader in an agile corporation. At the end of this session, you will know how agile Impacts entire organizations and be prepared to assist your company on the journey.
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Kent McDonald
A request for a new business intelligence (BI) report from the corporate data warehouse crosses your desk. How do you make sure that you truly understand the request and properly convey the requirements to the rest of the delivery team? This is a common question raised by business analysts working on data warehouse and business intelligence projects. Kent McDonald shows how to work with your stakeholders to develop succinct and accurate requirements for such projects and other data-intensive applications. Kent demonstrates how to understand a user’s BI needs by starting with the questions they want to answer and then building clear, concise, and meaningful requirements. Along the way, he demonstrates techniques for helping stakeholders clarify their information needs and discusses how to handle the common stakeholder request to “see all the data” because “we may want to organize our data by that information…some day.”
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Debra Lavell
Yes, your team CAN exceed expectations and deliver truly great experiences to your users! Join Debra Lavell and your peers to learn and practice ways to connect business strategies with user stories and to develop a clear and compelling product vision that starts your team on the path to a great product. Debra shares how Intel is implementing user-centered design practices to get beyond the technology needs of its users to address their critical human needs—emotions and senses. User-centered design has helped them reduce expensive rework, eliminate unnecessary features, and avoid embarrassing mistakes. Debra discusses how to establish a killer product (hint: a vision synchronized with the users’ goals and motivations) and shows how to keep the vision alive during the long product development process. She shares tricks, tips, and techniques that you can take back to your organization and begin using right away!
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Jennifer Brownson
“We’re all going to become more agile!” Many of us have heard this message from our management. However, as business analysts, we often are left wondering how we can become more agile without sacrificing the continuing need for quality, stability, and business requirements tied to business value. Join enterprise business analyst and agile practitioner Jennifer Brownson as she demystifies the role of business analysis in an agile organization. Learn how to partner with business owners in an agile environment, reinvent yourself as an agile business analyst, avoid common pitfalls, and apply agile analysis techniques in your organization. Explore with Jennifer how business analysts can be valuable change agents for agile initiatives and leave with an intuitive understanding of how business analysis and agile blend in real-world practice. By finding your fit in agile, you’ll help both the business and your career in the new, more agile world.
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Ellen Gottesdiener
How do you best enable customers and teams to collaborate early on—and often—during product development? Structured requirements workshops are a proven and popular practice for use in agile projects. Ellen Gottesdiener introduces the practices for conducting facilitated workshops—with names like Joint Application Design (JAD)—that are focused, highly productive events with carefully selected stakeholders and content experts. These workshops, led by a neutral facilitator, are designed to elicit and verify requirements quickly in a group setting. Learn how workshops differ from meetings, the business case for workshops, the key workshop roles, and approaches for designing and running effective workshops. And, if you’ve ever wondered how you can “lead from behind” when you’re not the designated facilitator, Ellen shares concrete actions to take for more productive collaborations.
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Jennifer Brownson, Ellen Gottesdiener, Debra Lavell, and Kent McDonald
To prepare for taking a certain course of action, you often benefit by first reflecting, then deciding, and finally acting. In today’s closing session, you’ll participate in a retrospective activity facilitated by your workshop hosts to summarize the day, enable richer conversations with your colleagues and hosts, and surface your questions, puzzles, and goals for your business analysis playbook. In addition to reflecting on your first workshop day and setting the stage for the next, you’ll participate in a fun exercise you can bring back to your project communities.
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Jennifer Brownson, Ellen Gottesdiener, Debra Lavell, and Kent McDonald
Begin your second day in the Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop with an interactive discussion with your hosts and colleagues using a fishbowl for deeper topic exploration, reflecting on puzzles and challenges, and enriching your business analysis playbook.
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Jennifer Brownson
“User stories don’t capture enough information to be real requirements. We need actors, alternate paths, pre-conditions, post-conditions, and success criteria, too.” Not necessarily true. Join Jennifer Brownson as she shows how user stories can replace or augment use cases for business analysis—the agile way. Walk through the lifecycle of a user story, how different development roles—quality assurance, testers, developers, technical writers, project managers, and ScrumMasters—interact with a user story and how use cases can still be part of an agile methodology. Jennifer explores the advantages and disadvantages of user stories vs. use cases and how to avoid common pitfalls when choosing or combining these techniques. Join in an exercise on writing user stories and translating user story elements to the standard use case format. At the end of the session, you will understand how to write a solid user story that can stand alone or enhance your current use case development cycle.
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Kent McDonald
Nowhere does the phrase “a picture is worth 1,000 words” hold more true than in software requirements. While a requirements document packed with thousands of “the system shall” statements reinforces the perception of business analysts as documenters, requirements models enable the high-value work of a BA—the analysis. Kent McDonald demonstrates how you can employ different types of requirements models that provide a rich description of the problem and possible solutions within your project. He offers situations and examples demonstrating when each of the requirements models is most appropriate to use. Join with Kent and your colleagues to try out requirements modeling on an example project. You’ll leave with a better understanding of when and how to develop models to tell the requirements story visually.
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Ellen Gottesdiener
Agile teams regularly deliver high value product features because all of the stakeholders are product partners. They work together to explore and evaluate product requirements and decide what to build and when to build it. Ellen Gottesdiener describes how to quickly reach a shared understanding of product requirements and agree on the most valuable requirements to build in planned delivery cycles. Learn to use the seven product dimensions to structure and streamline conversations with partners, align your requirements work with different planning horizons, apply value-based techniques for allocating requirements to development, and identify acceptance criteria to solidify shared expectations. Learn practices applicable to both traditional and agile projects, and return with techniques to help your projects deliver the best solution at the right time.
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Debra Lavell
Since 1999, Debra Lavell has been coaching requirements owners, authors, and reviewers in her company on specifying requirements so they are accurate and verifiable. In this hands-on session, Debra will help you learn a unique way to turn weak requirements into clear, concise, and measurable user and system requirements. Employing Planguage, a keyword-driven language developed by Tom Gilb, Debra demonstrates a precise way to describe both functional and non-functional requirements. By using Planguage, your efforts will produce fewer omissions, less ambiguity, and greater readability. Debra shares real life examples and templates she’s used to apply this approach in her company and evolve the practice across multiple projects. She explores the challenges and benefits of introducing a specification language into her organization. Come and learn how to write requirements using Planguage!
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Ellen Gottesdiener
Have you ever asked yourself, “Why is our company still working on this project?” If so, did you do anything about it? Top notch business analysts use their BA toolkit to help organizations convert strategy into valuable products and avoid those dead-end projects. Kent demonstrates how the best business analysts develop a skill set and employ tools that directly relate project deliverables to the organization’s strategy. He explores ways you can help team members understand these connections and use this knowledge to guide day-to-day decision making. Find out what to do if you find yourself on a project that does not align with organizational strategy—and, even more important, how to avoid this situation in the first place.
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Debra Lavell
Learning from each project and using its lessons to increase the productivity of the next team and project is a certain path to excellence. Debra Lavell shares how she helped set up a company-wide Organizational Learning & Retrospective practice to establish a systematic and repeatable way to discover, document, disseminate, and maintain the accumulated knowledge at the corporate level. She focused on capturing and sharing learning that reduces repetitive mistakes, increases knowledge transfer, and improves Intel’s overall product development processes. Debra shares what she learned along her journey delivering more than 300 project and milestone retrospectives worldwide in the past ten years. Take back a way to establish and sustain a vibrant and thriving BA Community of Practice in your organization with a knowledge-sharing process based on structured retrospectives.
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Jennifer Brownson, Ellen Gottesdiener, Debra Lavell, and Kent McDonald
With a newly enriched playbook, you’ll conclude the Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop with a retrospective activity to review key learning, new ideas, skill transfer challenges, and strategies for implementing your playbook when you return to your team and organization. Leave with a plan to put your personal development plan into action.
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