BA01 - The Business Analyst Crash Course

A quick immersion course in all the key knowledge areas of Business Analysis.

Course Outline

Description: An intensive practical course covering all aspects of the Business Analyst role – from requirements gathering to testing.  The emphasis of the course is on learning practical tools and techniques that can immediately be put to use.  All major techniques – both Structured and Object-Oriented (OO) – are addressed. Each trainee receives a hard copy of all course material as well as a Job Aids booklet, containing useful templates, examples, guidelines and glossary for use back on the job.

Why:

Most large companies and organizations that rely heavily on software for business operations, employ Business Analysts to communicate business needs to software developers. When analysts do not do their job effectively, the result is incomplete or incorrect requirements - leading causes of spiraling development costs and project delays.

In the Crash Course, you’ll learn how to cut costs and delays by improving communication between business stakeholders and developers through comprehensive requirements analysis and documentation and by guaranteeing results through structured testing and quality assurance.

What makes this course stand out from the competition?

1. Value for money: No course on the market offers this amount of content in so little time. How can we do this?  By removing all of the “fat” traditionally found in BA courses.
2. Tool-focused: This course focuses on the tools and techniques used by the BA to perform the role. Unlike in other introductory courses, you won't waste time learning generalities; you'll actually learn how to use the key BA techniques so you can hit the ground running.
3. Scenario-based training: One integrated, case study, based on real systems, is used throughout the course to provide a consistent  and realistic context for learning.
4. Experience: Our course is written and delivered by professionals with extensive practical experience in business analysis.
5. BABOK 2 alignment: Our course aligned with BABOK 2 – the Business Analyst Book of Knowledge published by the IIBA.  It has been developed by BABOK reviewers and is aligned with BABOK 2 knowledge areas, tools and techniques.
6. Supports ITIL V3: ITIL is the word’s most widely used set of guidelines for IT Service Management. The Noble Crash Course is the only course to that supports and maps to ITIL V3.
7. UML 2.2: The course is compliant with the latest version of the UML (Unified Modeling Language – the state-of-the-art standard for modeling real-world and IT systems.
8. CBAP accreditation: The Crash course has been reviewed and certified by the IIBA and is eligible for 14 credits towards CBAP (Certified BA Professional) accreditation.

Audience: 

• Entry-level IT Business Analysts and their managers
• Self-taught IT Business Analysts requiring a course that fills in the gaps and puts all the pieces together
• Systems Analysts and programmers interested in expanding their role into the business area.

Class Format:

The course content is presented through:

• an integrated case study based on a real-life system
• lectures
• one-on-one assistance during the workshop portion of the course

Objectives:

High-level objectives

• For the new BA:
o Gain hands-on experience in using essential business analysis tools
o Create requirements documentation that can be used as the basis for customized development, maintenance of existing systems or as selection criteria for off-the-shelf software

• For the experienced BA:
o Upgrade your tool usage to the latest standards and best practices: UML 2.2, BABOK 2 and ITIL V3  - the world’s most widely used set of guidelines for IT Service Management.
o Understand how all of the essential BA tools fit together in the performance of the BA role

Detailed objectives

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Conduct effective requirements-workshop sessions (facilitated meetings) for capturing and verifying requirements.
• Learn how and when to ask the right questions during requirements elicitation events.
• Create quality requirements documentation for that is comprehensive, unambiguous and promotes consistency and reuse.
• Elicit and document user requirements with use cases.
• Model business process workflow and user interactions with UML 2.2 activity diagrams.
• Capture and document complex business rules using decision tables.
• Interpret Structured Analysis Data Flow Diagram (DFD) models.
• Use Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) and UML Class Diagrams during interviews as effective tools for uncovering elusive business rules - which, when not discovered during elicitation, can be extremely expensive to implement.
• Learn how to convert Class Diagrams to ERDs and stakeholder-friendly textual business rules documentation
• Support the QA process by reviewing and ensuring the quality of the test strategy, test scenarios and test data using Structured Testing, Structured Walkthroughs, decision tables, use-case scenario testing and boundary-value analysis.
• Support the PM in managing requirements and planning a requirements-elaboration approach in the context of 2 of the major approaches to IT Project Management: Waterfall and Iterative-Incremental Development (a major aspect of agile processes).

Content:

• Brainstorming
• JAD (Joint Application Design)
• Business data modeling
• Entity Relationship Diagrams
• Use cases: textual documentation and diagrams
• Work Flow Breakdown and Analysis
• Activity Diagrams
• Data Flow Diagrams and Process Decomposition
• Decision Tables for Requirements Documentation and Testing
• Structured Testing principles and methods
• Structured Walkthroughs for QA
• Black Box requirements-based testing including boundary value analysis
• Systems testing (Regression, volume, stress, usability, performance tests)
• Mapping Business Analysis tools to project development phases for:
• Waterfall methodologies
• Iterative methodologies
• Managing Requirements
• Structural Object-Oriented (OO) tools for the Business Analyst, using UML 2
• Class diagrams
• Mapping ITIL V3 to the BA role

Daily Schedule

Day 1:
• Lesson 1: The BA Role and Requirements Elicitation                                
• Lesson 2: Analyzing Requirements with Use Cases

Lunch

• Lesson 3: Analyzing Workflow and Complex Requirements
• Lesson 4: Documenting Process Requirements using Structured Analysis

Day 2
• Lesson 5: Analyzing Business Rules using Data Modeling
• Lesson 6: Analyzing Business Rules using Structural Object-Oriented Modeling (Class Diagrams)

Lunch

• Lesson 7: The BA Role in Testing
• Lesson 8: Project and IT Service Management for the BA (with iTIL V3)

Additional Details

Pre-Requisites

Certificates offered

Duration: 2 days CDUs: 14 BABOK Compliance: Release 2 UML Compliance: 2.2 Supports: ITIL V3

Cancellation Policy

Map & Reviews

CTE Solutions
[ View Provider's Profile ]

CTE Solutions Toronto
77 Bloor St West
suite 1406
Toronto, Ontario
Canada   M5S 1M2

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Here are some reviews of the training vendor.

   

This course was great, very informative, had Lionel as instructor and he was also very good.

Reviewed by Robin T. 2012

   

Instructor was eager to assist but lacked subject matter expertise. Course time management was very poor. Content provided could have been delivered effectively in a one day course.

Reviewed by Inta N. 2012

   

Good Course, good trainer. All questions addressed equally and in a timely professional manner.

Reviewed by Joe L. 2011

   

The course content was interesting; however, the instructor didn't have enough knowledge about Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 Development and wasn't able to answer questions without google search. In the future CTE needs to make sure the instructors have real on-hands experience and are highly trained in the technologies they are supposed be teaching.

Reviewed by Heliana P. 2011