Overview of Business Analysis

This post is part of the series, A Curriculum for Business Analyst Self-Study. The course outline is copied with minor modifications from the catalog of LearningTree International. The purpose of copying this outline was to create a framework for posting links to resources that address the listed topics.

Overview of Business Analysis

Defining Business Analysis

• The business analysis discipline
• Key roles and responsibilities
• Distinguishing between business analysis and related disciplines
• The business analysis framework
• The framework and the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®)
• Industry best practice from the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®)
• The business analysis environment
• Traditional project management (US, PMI)
• Traditional project management (Euro, PRINCE2)
• Frank Turley: PRINCE2 Pre-Course (YouTube)
• Agile project management
• Business Analyst career roadmap
• Bridging the Gap: Free step-by-step planning course and planning guide

Capturing Business Requirements

• Gathering business needs
• Performing needs-analysis
• Choosing the best elicitation technique
• Soliciting enterprise-level contextual analysis
• Elicitation techniques
• Verifying the steps to gather information
• Recording and confirming elicitation results

Conducting Enterprise Analysis

• Analyzing the business landscape
• Categorizing and prioritizing business needs and issues using affinity diagrams
• Assessing business capabilities and gaps
• Detecting problems and finding opportunities
• Exposing root causes of problems
• Finding opportunities for growth
• Identifying elements of the initial solution scope
• Developing action-oriented business initiatives to address business needs and opportunities
• Measuring the feasibility of options
• 2x2 analysis grid
• Prioritization matrices
• Anticipating project benefits and costs
• Documenting critical project parameters
• Building SMART project objectives
• Specifying critical project elements and deliverables

Planning and Monitoring the Business Analysis Process

• Planning for requirements analysis
• Documenting assumptions, ground rules and templates
• Producing a requirements development plan to guide and manage the process
• Building the communication plan
• Performing stakeholder analysis
• Identifying key stakeholders
• Analyzing the impact stakeholders have on a project
• Developing a change management process
• Baselining your plan
• Following the defined change management process
• Managing the change control process

Managing and Communicating Requirements

• Analyzing requirements
• Verifying, prioritizing and organizing requirements
• Specifying the requirements document
• Identifying key relationships using traceability
• Executing the communication plan
• Addressing common pitfalls typically encountered during requirements development
• Validating the requirements document with key stakeholders
• Managing stakeholder agreement and conflict

Assessing and Validating Solutions

• Allocating requirements
• Optimizing business value
• Evaluating dependencies between requirements
• Assessing organizational readiness
• Identifying organizational capability gaps
• Defining business and technical organizational impacts
• Developing Business Analysis Competencies
• Going beyond the mechanics of analysis
• The IIBA® Business Analysis Competency framework

1. Overview of Business Analysis (this page)

2. Critical Thinking and Creative Problem Solving

3. Business Process Improvement

4. Finance and Accounting for Business Analysts

5. Effective Business Cases

6. Modeling

7. Developing User Requirements

8. User & System Requirements for Software Development

9. Business Analysis for Agile Projects

10. Agile Software Development and Modeling

11. Agile Test-Driven Development

12. IIBA® CBAP® and CCBA® Certifications