About Course

ABOUT COURSE

Every business analyst wants to make their project successful by delivering high quality requirements analysis. The reality is that system capabilities including IT or software constraints and business constraints will limit which requirements can be met and how well each requirement can be met.

This course covers best practice methods and techniques for requirements analysis. By using these techniques to identify the essential requirements and processes for your organisation, you will be able to adapt your requirements analysis to work within and around constraints to ensure your project has the best possible requirements to work with.

 “Speaker had a lot of knowledge and background experience so could give real examples of situations, and not just textbook answers. Great course and great instructor/speaker. Everyday real examples were discussed and environment was good for sharing. Definitely recommend this course very relaxed atmosphere conducive to learning.”

Mikola Kyle, Business Analyst, KiwiBank



NEW SKILLS YOU WILL LEARN

• Techniques and tricks for successful requirement elicitation
• Best practice techniques for requirement analysis
• Be able to identify essential processes and requirements which must be upheld
• Identify the system constraints which limit which processes can be used
• Develop options for Business Process Improvement
• Be able to find a successful meeting point which maintains all the essential requirements whilst optimising other requirements to work within constraints

Course Outline

COURSE OUTLINE

Requirement elicitation

• Scoping the project
• Identifying all stakeholders and their relationship with the project
• Various approaches to eliciting both functional and non-functional requirements
• Communicating with the aid of visual representations of requirements
• Getting users to tell you what they truly want
• Prototyping to discover hidden requirements
• Documenting elicited requirements
• Elicitation challenges

Best practice techniques for requirement analysis

• Judging the quality of requirements
• Categorising requirements
• Documenting and understanding the whole requirements without solution bias
• Choosing the best analysis technique to adapt to a specific process or organisation
• Entity relationship diagram and decomposition diagram tricks
• Obtaining maximum benefit from use-case diagrams eg reusable use cases
• Dealing with repeated data elements
• Governance requirement issues
• Challenges common to developing effective requirement analysis

Requirements review to identify essential processes and requirements

• Conducting a requirements review: when to do it and who to involve
• Testing for missing or incomplete requirements
• Matching requirements with their solution components (traceability)
• Prioritising requirements
• Solution tables
• Technical priorities and costs for functions of priorities
• Identifying core requirements and baselines and their component processes

System and business constraints

• Performing a system capability analysis
• Identifying and documenting constraints
• Organisational capability gaps including staffing/performance; scalability issues and quality caps
• Software interfaces and their effect on requirements and processes
• Requirement trade-offs and conflicting requirements
• Overcoming major obstacles in making your design meet all requirements

Developing BPI options

• Getting around “we’ve always done it that way”
• System development life cycle: from business data to a physical design
• Improving the system and finding ways to reduce constraints
• Determining solution scope
• Measuring option feasibility: analysis grid and matrices
• Gap analysis including transition requirements
• Comparing different solutions: benefits and costs
• Iteration planning: adapting to changes in user requirements

Fitting your solution to the system and business constraints

• Evaluating dependencies between core requirements and other requirements
• Developing transitional and modified requirements and determining optimised processes to fit these requirements
• Avoiding requirements creep by testing requirements before they become part of the specification
• Negotiating with stakeholders and obtaining approval to modify requirements
• Developing an implementation plan for a smooth roll-out of the solution
• Creating user documentation and training end users

Facilitator

Andrew McNaughton, Senior Business Analyst (Contract), Southern Cross Healthcare

Andrew came from a science background before joining Telecom.  Starting as a 123 CSR he worked through training and operational roles before starting as an associate business analyst.  After 10 years with Telecom, Andrew left to work as a freelance Business Analyst and reluctantly added the prefix “Senior” to his job title. He has worked as a Business Analyst focusing on requirements analysis for many organisations including; the Waikato District Health Board; Augen Software Group; and Southern Cross Healthcare.

Andrew McNaughton is also facilitating:

• Effective Communication for IT Business Analysts
• Eliciting Business Requirements
• Scrum and Lean Techniques for the Agile Business Analyst

In-house Training