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.

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.

Learning objectives

By attending this two-day course, you will learn:

• How to identify the customer segments, and what is truly valuable to them
• How not to assume a solution, but to discover the real problem
• How to ensure your solution solves the right problem
• How safe-to-fail probes prove your solution delivers value
• How to design more usable solutions
• How to use story maps to display the narrative of your product
• How to integrate business analysis practices with agile delivery
• How business analysis agility helps you to write better traditional requirements specifications
• Be a better business analyst.

Who should attend?

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 find Business Stakeholders, Users and Software Customers benefit from learning advanced business analysis techniques, and how they can contribute to the organisation’s well-being.

Course Outline

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.

The concurrent, iterative activities of agile business analysis.

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 is a natural companion to Mastering the Requirements Process, where we teach the art of requirements writing. The models and understanding produced by Business Analysis Agility are the optimal input, and foundation for, your requirements process. You receive a free copy of the book Business Analysis Agility: Delivering Value, Not Just Software by James & Suzanne Robertson.

IREB

The Atlantic Systems Guild is a recognised training provider of the International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB) for both the foundation level and the advanced level syllabi.

Please note: the number of attendees is limited. Please register early!