What is Business Analysis?

• IT business analysis
• Business process improvement
• Challenges of gathering and analyzing requirements
• History and current trends in business analysis
• Role of the business analyst through the project life cycle

Defining the Business Problem

• Techniques to determine the underlying business problems
• Understanding the business environment at a high-level
• Relating business problems and processes

Root Causes of Problems

• Business problems and root causes
• Applying modeling to understand root causes (the AS-IS state)

Solution Vision and Scope

• Vision and envisioning
• The key players in setting the vision
• How to determine the product scope
• Quantifying process improvement goals

Making the Business Case

• How the business analyst adds insight to business cases
• Estimating the benefits associated with the product

Modeling the Future State

• Models and modeling
• Relating models to requirements
• Modeling the information requirements (data modeling)
• Modeling the TO-BE state (process and workflow modeling)

Getting Requirements from Models

• The value of Use Cases
• Use Case analysis
• Unified Modelling Language (UML) and object-oriented analysis

Requirements Definition and Documentation

• SMART requirements
• Identifying the boundary between requirements and specifications
• Managing changes to the requirements

Quality Assurance and Testing

• The business analyst's role in testing
• Quality assurance activities: checking and testing
• Introduction to test strategies and plans