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 Learning Objectives

What will you learn here ? (+ a 2-minute video introduction)

Special Features

• Teaching chapters are reinforced with hands-on workshops
• The course is run interactively with lots of opportunity to discuss issues with the instructor, and with other participants
• You are shown how the course applies to your own work situation
• Your instructors have real world experience, and are willing to discuss how you can be most effective doing business analysis in your organisation

Why we organize this workshop: Increasing importance of business analysis and business analysts

FREE BOOK for all participants:

Business Analysis Agility

Whether you work in an agile team, or write traditional specifications, the essential business analysis task is to uncover the real needs of the real customers. Without understanding the real need, it is extremely difficult to deliver real value. Actually, assuming you know the solution is where many agile projects go astray, and is also where good business analysis shows its true value.

Your organization is constantly having to adapt to the relentless changes to its environment – changes to the law, changes in the marketplace, changes in technology, and changes to the available opportunities. Any change results in a development effort to deliver a new or enhanced software system, business process, consumer product or service. Furthermore, the rate of change is so rapid that we simply don’t have time to get the wrong result and deliver the wrong solution.

This course is about using analytical skills to understand the real, underlying problem to solve. It is about integrating business analysis skills into your team regardless of whether it is an agile team, or a more traditional one producing a complete requirements specification. It is about ensuring that you always deliver the right solution, and that you deliver quickly.

This workshop is based on a brand new book with the same name, written by workshop facilitator James Robertson.

Who should attend this workshop ?

Business analysis is a skill that should be present in all development efforts, and in day-to-day organisational tasks. The skill is usually, but not necessarily, associated with job titles such as:

• Business Analyst
• Product Owner
• Agile Team Member
• Systems Analyst
• Project Leader
• Requirements Engineer
• Product or Program Manager
• or similar titles.

We also believe that Business Stakeholders, Users, Software Customers and Testers will benefit from learning advanced business analysis techniques, and how they can contribute to the organisation's wellbeing.

Why should you attend this workshop ?

Despite our technological advances, the biggest problem is still the human one: how to correctly understand the customer’s real problem, and how to ensure that your solution is correctly solving that problem.

The real problem is not found by running endless prototypes past our customers. Nor is it likely that an assumed solution will deliver much value. However, analytical thinking uncovers the real needs and allows the right solution to emerge. This means:

• Finding all the customer or user segments, and which of them yields the best, and the earliest value
• Using value propositions to meet the real needs of the customers
• Using safe-to-fail probes to ensure that any proposed solution solves the right problem and delivers the right value
• Deploying an iterative approach to discovering the real problem, and progressively feeding the right stories to the delivery activity
• Understating that by discovering the right needs and solving the right problem you deliver real value to your customer and your sponsor
• Doing all this quickly and effectively

This course gives you a different approach to business analysis. This one provides a business analysis framework that works regardless of whether you are part of an agile environment and need to provide stories for iterative development, or whether you are in a traditional environment and need to produce a requirements specification suitable for more formalized environments and outsourcing.

What’s in it for You ?

Our businesses thrive or flounder on the effectiveness of their business processes, both automated and manual. Businesses with good processes provide a better service and are more responsive to their customers. The converse is also true. Business analysis is the craft of enlightened improvement to business systems and processes. Moreover, business analysis gives you ways of identifying the areas where development efforts will yield the highest value.

This two-day course in business analysis gives you the skills and tools to discover your client's real business, and to determine and demonstrate the best ways of improving it.

This course gives you a vision of the modern business analyst, one who understands the business analyst's role is much more than writing requirements. This course is a natural companion to Mastering the Requirements Process, where we teach the art of requirements writing. The models and understanding from Business Analysis Agility are the foundation for your requirements process.

 Full Programme

FREE BOOK for all participants:

Business Analysis Agility

This live online workshop is spread over 2 days, from 9h00 till 17h00, with a lunch break around 12h30.

This workshop was designed by requirements guru James Robertson, and is co-presented by James Robertson and Adrian Reed. Both are experienced consultants, teachers, authors and practitioners whose work in the area of business analysis and requirements gathering is valued by clients around the world.

We explore business analysis and show you how you can be more agile, more adaptable in your business analysis activities.

The opening section presents a framework for discovering the customers and their needs, for finding solutions and evaluating them, designing the business solution and getting it built. It looks at how business analysis integrates with either agile or traditional development.

How to identify and prioritise customer segments. For the highest priority segments, you determine value propositions that set down what you must deliver to satisfy the customers' business needs. This value proposition is the foundation for solving the problem.

TYou and your customers generate candidate solutions. Then to prove that a candidate is solving the right problem, it is the subject of a safe-to-fail probe. This is a quick, cheap experiment to determine the viability, the suitability and the outcome of a solution. Most importantly, you ensure the candidate solves the right problem and fulfils the right need.

The solution space includes the people, software and devices used to meet the needs of the customer segments. You investigate this space by looking at the necessary business processes and data.

Here you form the business solution to make it usable and convenient. The designing business analyst uses elements of the problem, the desired impact of the solution, the behaviour of the target customer segments, and the value proposition to craft the best possible solution.

SStories are fundamental to most agile development. However, if they are to be useful, the stories must be the right stories. This section gives you an approach to writing the right stories, ones that address the real customer problems. We also show you how story maps give you a more descriptive and usable backlog. Story maps are the ideal repository for the information you are discovering, and the stories needed for the development cycles.

This section reviews the course and points out how by being agile, business analysis can be done quickly. We also look at other aspects of business analysis, how to break down silos, the minimal amount of effective documentation.

This section reviews the course, shows how the business analysis activites are overlapping and iterative, discusses other aspects of business analyis, and shows you how by being agile, business analysis can be done quickly and effectively.

 Speakers

Questions about this ? Interested but you can't attend ? Send us an email !