Business Analysis Essentials

Have your software projects been suffering from the age-old development problems of slipped schedules and ballooning budgets? Has your development organization experienced a variety of failed and canceled projects? Why do requirements errors cost more to correct than any other class of error? How can you best deal with requirements which the user can express only in vague terms?

It is estimated that 85 percent of the defects in developed software originate in the requirements. Once defects are embedded in the requirements, they tend to resist removal. They are especially difficult to find via testing. Therefore it is crucial that training be required for business requirements analysts and engineers that explains how to reduce the common types of requirements errors, including incorrect assumptions (49 percent), omitted requirements (29 percent), inconsistent requirements (13 percent), and ambiguities (5 percent).

At the project?s earliest stages the business analyst is key to defining the requirements, as well as planning, defining and validating project scope. It?s important to have an understanding of the breadth of knowledge that a business analyst brings to the project team when developing business solutions.

Defining a clear set of customer requirements is an essential and important first step to successful software projects. This workshop will provide participants with industry proven methods for successfully identifying, analyzing, specifying and documenting better user requirements for software projects.

In this course, you gain the knowledge and skills needed to capture software requirements using clearly defined processes. You learn to specify user and system requirements, match the process to the size of your project and apply quality and consistency tests to the requirements model.

Requirements gathering is the cornerstone of any software development project. Failing to obtain proper user and system requirements can result in an ineffective software project burdened by increased costs. In addition, many requirement documents fail to capture the non-functional requirements, the "ilities" that also lead to poor system acceptance

Participants learn how to create Business Case and Business Requirements documents. These deliverables will identify what the project will do (and for whom) and what it will not do (also known as in-scope and out of scope.) This information is also needed by the Business Sponsors to decide whether or not the project should proceed to the next step, frequently known as the Functional Specifications.

The workshop follows and reinforces the IIBA BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge), and the PMI (Project Management Institute) Project Scope Management and other related Knowledge Areas.

This course provides a special focus on the business analysis function as it relates to developing IT solutions, given that such an understanding is essential for project success.

The course discusses the business analysis process as it is applied throughout a project, including the pre-project activities that comprise enterprise analysis.

After completing this course, you will understand why, when and how to involve the business analysis function.