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Building Your Playbook for Success
CLICK HERE TO VIEW COMPLETE SCHEDULE BELOW |
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Successful software projects rely on good business analysis to deliver the right software for the business. Organizations need people 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 require 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 and 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 |
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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 that will 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, requirements architects, requirements engineers, business managers, project managers, developers, product owners, test analysts, user experience analysts, ScrumMasters, and internal consultants.
Attendance at this workshop includes the following:
• 60 Days 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 towards the IIBA™)
Joy Beatty, Ellen Gottesdiener, Kent McDonald, Linda Rising, Doug Talbott, Ken Pugh
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Joy Beatty, Ellen Gottesdiener, Kent McDonald, Linda Rising, Doug Talbott
As skilled analysts you need a diverse toolkit of knowledge, skills, and practices—your personal playbook—to help steer projects toward valuable solutions. In this kickoff to our two-day workshop, your hosts share interesting new research, skills, and practices that will enrich your playbook. Delivered in a fast-paced “lightning talk” format by the workshop’s five facilitators, this session gives you the opportunity to engage with your colleagues and get revved up for your learning experience.
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Joy Beatty
Rather than being given the time they need to create well-crafted results, business analysts often are required to create requirements under an imposed deadline. Unfortunately, few rigorous business analysis estimation techniques exist to help defend the resources required to do good analysis. Joy Beatty shares an estimation technique for requirements development that breaks the work down into common activities with standard resource estimates that are based on real project data. She describes how you can estimate the effort for process flows, user stories, business rules, etc., to calculate a reasonable estimate. Joy provides you with a take-home tool that fits into both waterfall and agile methodologies, and explains how you can adapt it for use in your organization.
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Ellen Gottesdiener
Myths abound about the role of analysis on agile projects. Some believe analysis is always done just in time—inside an iteration without planning or pre-work. Others believe the role of the business analyst or requirements engineer is unnecessary. In practice, the truth is that the work of analysis is essential to establishing and maintaining “flow” within an agile team. Learn how effective agile projects leverage business analysis to deliver business value efficiently. Ellen Gottesdiener reveals the realities and debunks the myths surrounding agile business analysis, how work-ahead analysis is vital to the ever-changing product backlog, ways in which analysis practices eliminate waste, the different levels of agile planning used, and how agile planning is requirements- and value-driven.
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Kent McDonald
Have you ever asked, “Why is the company working on this project?” If so, what did you do about it? Business analysts have at their disposal a set of tools to help an organization convert its strategy to reality. In this session, Kent McDonald, Linda Rising, and Joy Beatty demonstrate how business analysts can utilize their toolset to identify how their project supports the organization’s strategy, help their team members understand this tie, and use that tie to guide day-to-day decisions on the project. Kent, Linda, and Joy also discuss what to do if you find yourself on a project that does not appear to align with organizational strategy—and how to avoid this situation in the first place.
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Ken Pugh
Acceptance tests are valuable for business analysts, testers, and customers. They enable team members to collaborate on requirements elicitation and specification, provide early validation of requirements, reduce delays in testing, and increase overall communication among customers and delivery team members. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development, explains why it works, and outlines the different roles the team members play in the process. Ken shares examples of how the process clarifies the work to be done and helps create a common domain language. He demonstrates the “given-when-then” style of tests and shows how to use tables to record specific examples of these tests. This joint session for testers and business analysts includes two exercises that allow you to experience creating acceptance tests together.
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Linda Rising
Influencing stakeholders is essential in business analysis. It begins at project inception and continues throughout analysis, development, acceptance testing, and release. You might need to convince people of the business case, your approach to analysis, the requirements and design, or alternative business solutions. You must speak to others’ subconscious motivators rather than their rational, analytic side. Linda Rising shares influence strategies to help you more effectively convince others of “the right way” forward. These strategies take advantage of hardwired human traits—liking, reciprocity, social proof, consistency, authority, and scarcity. Learn how to use this valuable toolkit in concert with your logical, left-brain techniques to become a more successful influencer.
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Doug Talbott
All too often developers are tasked with building products they don’t really understand. Visualization and low-fidelity prototyping are fast, easy, and effective techniques to establish a clear product vision and a roadmap for development. You can employ these techniques in both traditional and agile processes, applying them both before and during development. Join Doug Talbott to learn the value of visualizing requirements and creating low-fidelity prototypes, discover a few simple techniques to determine what to visualize and how to prototype, and take back the steps necessary to develop effective product understanding. Working in small teams, you’ll practice these skills through a hands-on exercise—converting persona-based scenarios and use cases into product sketches and paper prototypes.
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Joy Beatty, Ellen Gottesdiener, Kent McDonald, Linda Rising, Doug Talbott
End your first day in the Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop with a panel discussion among your hosts. Lee Copeland will facilitate the panel so you can ask your toughest questions about business analysis practices, address pain points you want to overcome, examine puzzles from your first day of learning, and explore possibilities for enriching your business analysis playbook.
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Joy Beatty, Ellen Gottesdiener, Kent McDonald, Linda Rising, Doug Talbott
To learn and prepare for action you often benefit by reflecting before deciding and then acting. To begin the day, you’ll participate in a reflective, retrospective activity to prepare your day in the Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop. This session enables richer conversations with your colleagues and hosts while surfacing puzzles and identifying practical goals for your business analysis playbook. In addition to reflecting on your first workshop day and setting the stage for today, you’ll “learn by doing” a retrospective practice that you can take back to your project communities.
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Linda Rising
Collaborating with customers builds a solid foundation for business analysis and requirements development. Linda Rising and Ellen Gottesdiener share patterns solutions to common problems that occur again and again—that help in the direct, face-to-face interactions with customers. Using short examples, participants explore underlying problems encountered in customer collaboration and the interaction patterns that can help improve communication. In this highly interactive session, you’ll share your real-world customer challenges and, using the patterns as an anchor, collaborate with your colleagues to identify concrete actions you can take to address the challenges.
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Joy Beatty
A list of 2,563 “the system shall” statements must be one of the most boring things to read—or write. It’s no wonder that developers struggle with traditional requirements documents. Because reviewing long lists of “shall” statements would put anyone into a daze, analysts and others reading such documents have no way of knowing if they contain a complete, correct, and consistent set of requirements. Joy Beatty introduces a requirements modeling language you can use to visually specify requirements and make requirements deliverables easier to read and validate. She presents several requirements models, explains how to create them, and provides examples from real projects. Joy describes how to select which models to use based on your project type and audience, and how to combine them to provide a full picture of the system.
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Kent McDonald
“My users are asking for a report, but how do I make sure I truly understand their needs and properly convey that 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 and Linda Rising show how to work with your stakeholders to develop useful requirements for such projects and other data-intensive applications. Kent and Linda demonstrate how to understand a user’s business intelligence needs by starting with the questions they want to answer and then build clear, concise, and meaningful requirements. Along the way, they demonstrate techniques for helping stakeholders clarify their information needs and discuss 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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Doug Talbott
All too often, development teams end up building software products that just don’t meet customers’ expectations in terms of usefulness and usability. In this session, you’ll learn how to increase your development team’s chances of success through product concept and usability testing. Learn why we test, what to test, and examine a variety of testing techniques. Doug will cover the development of the test protocol including orientation scripts, background scripts, procedures, room setup, and data collection. Working in teams, you’ll have an opportunity to apply these skills in an interactive test planning session. Take away a step-by-step process for planning and conducting a typical usability test session.
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Ellen Gottesdiener
Understanding nonfunctional requirements is essential for building the right product and building it right. Yet analysts, developers, and customers often struggle with when and how to define and document nonfunctional requirements. Some teams neglect them during requirements analysis, considering them less important than functional requirements. Or they specify them incompletely or in un-testable ways and, only later, discover that unexplored nonfunctional requirements pose architectural risks that are difficult to overcome late in development. Ellen Gottesdiener helps you identify and define key nonfunctional requirements including quality attributes, external interfaces, and design and implementation constraints. You’ll learn practical techniques to represent quality attributes and define their acceptance criteria in a testable form. Discover ways to visualize external interfaces and learn the value of eliciting nonfunctional requirements in tandem with user requirements.
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Joy Beatty
Typically, business analysts within an organization have a variety of skill levels and operate with inconsistent practices. To expand their competence and standardize processes, many organizations are implementing a Business Analysis Center of Excellence (BA-COE). However, it can be difficult to know where to start. Joy Beatty explains the value of a BA-COE and identifies the key elements an organization needs to build one. She provides details about the components that make up a BA-COE—training, practices, tools, mentoring, and assessments—and helps you select the components that are most relevant to your organization. Joy suggests specific metrics you can track to evaluate the success of your BA-COE and discusses how to get past common challenges in establishing a BA-COE.
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Joy Beatty, Ellen Gottesdiener, Kent McDonald, Linda Rising, Doug Talbott
With your newly enriched analysis playbook, we conclude the Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop with a retrospective 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 and organizational development into action.
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