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 Learning Objectives

Business Analysis Agility shows you how to: (also check out this 2-minute video)

This interactive live online workshop is so much more than a webinar

• Teaching chapters are reinforced with hands-on workshops (via break-out rooms and collaborative whiteboards)
• 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

The BA and PO facilitate these 2 iterative processes

The business analysts work closely with the customers to establish their work and its needs, and to ensure that the real business problem — it’s not always obvious, and not always what is said — is clearly understood by everybody.

To uncover the problem, the agile business analyst uses multiple candidate solutions to probe the customers, their objectives and their values. Candidate solutions are the preferred way of working as they have shown themselves to be extremely effective at prompting customers to reveal their real problems and underlying needs.

Business analysts use a story map to communicate the requirements for the solution to the developers. This means that the analysts and the developers work together iteratively and incrementally. The analysts are adding stories about the needs of the solution and the customers as the developers enhance and retrieve the stories in time for each development cycle. With co-ordination from the product owner, the analysts and the developers synchronise their efforts so business analysis results are delivered just in time for the next development cycle. The emphasis throughout is on close collaboration, and a relentless focus on solving the right problem.

This workshop is based on a brand new book with the same name. We will send this to you before the workshop, as well as the handouts.

This workshop is aimed at business analysts working with an agile team

FREE BOOK for all participants:

Business Analysis Agility

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.

This workshop helps you understand the real problem, and find the best solution

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 formalised environments and outsourcing.

You learn how to:

• Find the customer (or user) segments, and determine which of them yields the best, and the earliest value
• Use safe-to-fail probes to ensure that a candidate solution solves the right problem and delivers the right value
• Deploy an iterative approach to discovering the real problem, and progressively feed the right stories to the delivery activity
• Understand that by discovering the right needs and solving the right problem, you deliver real value to your customer and your sponsor
• Do business analysis more quickly and effectively

What’s in it for You ?

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.

It 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 programme is spread over 2 days, from 9h00 till 17h00. There is a morning coffee/tea break, a lunch break and an afternoon coffee/tea break. Our workshop leaders will answer your questions and talk about your specific business analysis, requirements and/or innovation problems that you have, after the workshop, from 17h00 till 17h30.

James Robertson is an experienced consultant, teacher, author and practitioner whose area of concern is the requirements for products, and the contribution that good requirements make to successful projects. His work in the area of business analysis and requirements gathering is valued by clients around the world.

Adrian Reed is a true advocate of the business analysis profession. In his day job, he acts as Principal Consultant and Director at Blackmetric Business Solutions where he provides Business Analysis consultancy and training solutions to a range of clients in varying industries.

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

We take you through a framework for discovering the customers and their needs, for finding solutions and evaluating them, designing the business solution and getting it built. We look at how business analysis integrates with either agile or traditional development.

Identify and prioritise the customer segments. Customer, or user, segments are groups of people with the same characteristics and the same needs. For the highest priority segments, you produce value propositions that set down what you must deliver to satisfy the customers’ business needs. This value proposition is the foundation for what is to follow.

You ensure that it is worthwhile to provide value to a customer segment by looking at the value the segment brings to your organisation.

The business problem is, “How might you deliver the value proposition?” You and your team generate candidate solutions. Instead of stopping at one, you always find that subsequent candidates improve on the original.

To prove that a candidate is solving the right problem, each 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. You are also working with your customers to ensure that the candidate is solving the right problem and fulfilling the right need.

The solution space includes the people, software and devices used to fulfil the needs of the customer segments. When you are investigating this space, you are looking at the necessary business processes, and perhaps building process and data models of them to help with your understanding. You also scope the space so that the team can agree on the extent of the solution.

The solution involves, and is used by humans, so the investigation studies the culture and characteristics of the people involved in the solution. The investigation is quick, but thorough enough to prevent any nasty surprises for the development team.

Anything worthwhile is designed. Here you design 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.

Any valuable solution will be innovative. This section looks at some innovation techniques, especially in the areas of providing better information, and making the solution more convenient for its users.

Stories 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.

We demonstrate how business analysis can be integrated with, and improve Agile methods such as Scrum, Crystal, etc.

We take a look at lean thinking, and how the agile business analyst can avoid waste, unevenness and overburden.

While you can do your business analysis in an agile way, some organisations require a traditional requirements specification – so we show you how to build one from the results of your agile analysis.

 Speakers

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