Getting started in your business analysis career is overwhelming.

You need to develop a deep understanding of your organization... its products, people, processes, technology, and customers.

At the same time, you have to build expertise in a challenging field with a ton of contradicting advice and very little in the way of coaching.

Adding to this dilemma, it’s common for managers of BAs not to fully understand our role. Their most common expectation is for us to get certified as Business Analysts… and fast.

To do this, you need to quickly and effectively build a solid foundation in the practices and methods of business analysis.

The best and fastest way for you to get started in this task is our Business Analysis Foundations course.

This course teaches you everything you need to know to be effective in the business analysis role. No more passive learning by osmosis: You'll be doing business analysis the whole time. And along the way, you get a ton of practice, advice, and coaching from one of the most expert practitioners in the field.

Certification: 21 PDUs 

This course provides 21 professional development units (PDUs) toward the business analysis certification of your choice.

Suitability

This course is ideal for professionals seeking business analysis certification or those broadening their business and technical skill set.

As founder of NorwalkAberdeen, Don Hussey has taught business analysis to more than 20,000 students spanning 145 countries.

Prior to starting the firm, he led the Business Analysis Center of Excellence for Citigroup Private Bank, managing teams of Business Analysts, coordinating enterprise-level analysis activities, and defining the business analysis value proposition for the bank. He has managed BAs, taught BAs, mentored BAs, interviewed BAs, and hired BAs.

Earlier in his career, he worked in a variety of BA roles:

• Senior Vice President, Strategic Program Management, Citigroup
• Vice President, Global Internet Strategy, Citigroup
• Member of the Board of Directors, IIBA New York
• Business Analyst/Product Manager, Morgan Stanley

On your first day in the class, you’ll learn all about the Business Analyst role and the environment in which we operate.

Session 1: Business Analysis

In this session, you'll learn what the work is all about, the role of requirements in the modern enterprise, and the role of the Business Analyst (both from strategic and tactical viewpoints).

By the end of this session, you’ll be able to answer questions like:

• What is business analysis?
• What is the my role in my organization?
• Why is change management so important?
• What are requirements? What qualities do good requirements have?
• What does a typical Business Analyst day look like?

Session 2: Stakeholders

We'll then move on to "Stakeholders," where we will determine who they are and why they matter. You'll learn about the most common stakeholder interests and how to resolve conflicts among them.

By the end of this session, you’ll be able to answer questions like:

• Who are the stakeholders in my work?
• Which are the key stakeholders that I have to manage carefully?
• What strategies can I deploy to manage them?
• How can I keep them engaged and invested in my projects?
• How do I handle situations where they have conflicting needs?

Session 3: Life Cycles

In the afternoon, we will move on to Life Cycles. Here, you'll learn everything you need to know about how projects are run, systems are developed, and products are managed. This session includes a complete overview of waterfall, iterative, and agile methodologies. We also cover NorwalkAberdeen's highly usable requirements development process.

By the end of this session, you’ll be able to answer questions like:

• What is the big picture of how systems are developed?
• What are the differences among waterfall, iterative, and agile project approaches?
• Which project approach makes the most sense for my situation?
• How has product development evolved over the past several years?
• What is the best process to use to manage requirements?

On the second day of the class, we’ll start looking at requirements in significant detail.

Session 4: Forming Requirements

In our morning session, we’ll examine what requirements are, the various types and how they fit together, and the process by which we source requirement information and convert it into requirement documentation.

By the end, you’ll be able to answer questions like:

• What are requirements? How can I tell if a requirement is sound?
• Why is it important to capture requirement sources and rationales?
• What is the best way to construct a hierarchy of business, user, functional, and nonfunctional requirements?
• How can I trace strategies and management expectations down to the functional requirements that implement them?
• How can I identify necessary nonfunctional requirements?
• How can I effectively plan, prepare for, conduct, and follow up on requirement elicitation meetings?
• What are the various forms of requirement documentation, and how can I choose the best set for my project?

Session 5: Analyzing Requirements

In our afternoon session, we’ll examine the process by which we analyze requirements, focusing on core methods, such as stakeholder needs analysis, decomposition, gap analysis, root cause analysis, decision analysis, and several others.

By the end of the session, you’ll be able to answer questions like:

• How can I break a complex topic down into manageable pieces?
• How can I identify the roles played by components of a complex subject?
• How can I summarize the changes necessary to convert an environment from the current state to the future state?
• How can I determine the root causes of a problem within my enterprise?
• How can I identify the most attractive solution to a problem, based on hard numbers?

On the final day of the class, we’ll complete our discussion of requirements, with a focus on modeling, presenting, finalizing, and managing requirements.

Session 6: Modeling Requirements

In our morning session, we will take a deep dive into requirements modeling. Our survey will include powerful methods, such as flowcharts, entity-relationship, diagrams, data flow diagrams, use case modeling, and business process modeling (BPM), and several others.

By the end of the session, you’ll be able to answer questions like:

• How can I create simple and effective flowcharts, understood by all stakeholders?
• How can I effectively depict how data entities are related to each other and which attributes they have?
• How can I model the changes in state that a business object undergoes in the course of a process?
• How can I portray how data flows through a system or organization?
• How can I build effective use case models? And what insights can I derive from them?
• How should I fine-tune my business process models, based on our intent to improve the organization vs. reengineering it?
• How relevant are UML and BPMN for me in the workplace?

Session 7: Finalizing and Managing Requirements

In our final session, we’ll wrap up the class with coverage of how we finalize requirements documentation and manage requirements assets. We’ll start off the discussion with best practices in requirements presentation. We’ll then cover the process of socializing and approving them. Finally, we’ll wrap up with a discussion of change control and common requirements tools.

By the end, you’ll be able to answer questions like:

• What is the best way to present requirements document to achieve the goal of gaining acceptance and moving forward with the project?
• How can I influence wary stakeholders to approve my requirements?
• How should I handle situations where the project sponsor considers 98% of the requirements to be “high priority?”
• After requirements are approved and baselined, what process should I use for subsequent changes?
• What are the most common requirements management systems, and how I can use them effectively in a team setting?