Essentials of Business Analysis
Overview
If you’re involved in eliciting, analyzing and defining project requirements, Essentials of Business Analysis could be a valuable course to help build your expertise. This eight-week course teaches business analysts, managers and professionals to identify, analyze and design processes that improve the overall flow of information within a company.
You will gain skills to determine the business requirements that drive IT-related projects, plus learn how to maintain an effective information system to ensure timely delivery of cost-effective products. Read more about business analysis training.
53.25 PDUs | 8 Continuing Education Units
80 Military Clock Hours | 10 Military Clock Hours Per Week
Who Should Register?
This business analysis course is for anyone involved in gathering, analyzing, documenting and validating information in a professional environment or those looking to transition into the role of business analyst. It provides knowledge, skills and techniques that can help enable you to strengthen your organization in key areas.
Course offerings and associated prices are subject to change without prior notice. Pricing for multi-course certificate programs varies depending on course selection. View the Professional Education Catalog for more information on the courses and programs.
What You’ll Study
Planning for Requirements
- Introduction to the BABOK Guide
- Stakeholders in Business Analysis
- Understanding needs
- Predictive vs. Adaptive Methodologies
- Complexity and Risk
- Business Analyst Role
- Stakeholder Identification and Analysis
- Requirements Reuse
- Managing requirements changes and approvals
- Planning and Communication for Business Analysts
- Assessing Business Analysis Performance
- Business Analysis Governance
Eliciting Requirements and Working With Stakeholders
- Elicitation Tasks
- Determining Elicitation Techniques:
- Individual Elicitation Techniques
- Workshop techniques
- Understanding the scope of elicitation
- Guiding the elicitation activity
- Communicating elicitation results
Requirements Lifecycle Management
- Requirements Analysis and Prioritization
- Allocating and Tracing Requirements
- Approving Requirements
- How to combine waterfall and agile approaches
Strategy Analysis
- Analyze Current State
- Determining Business Needs
- Assessing the current state
- Defining the Future State
- Understanding Business Goals and Objectives
- Defining Solution Scope
- Defining Assumptions and Constraints
- Defining Potential Value
- Assessing Risks
- Defining Change Strategy
Requirements Analysis and Design
- Specifying and Modeling Requirements
- Requirements Attributes
- Implementing appropriate levels of abstraction
- Analyzing Requirements
- Verifying Requirements
- Generating quality requirements
- Evaluating Requirements
- Defining Requirements Architecture
- Identifying Design Options
- Analyzing Potential Value
- Solution Recommendation
Solution Evaluation
- Determine Solution Performance Measures
- Measure Solution Performance
- Assessing Solution Limitations
- Assessing Enterprise Limitations
- Recommending Actions to Increase Solution Value
Curriculum
8 Week Course
Planning for Requirements
- Plan for the business analysis approach to be used
- Selecting the appropriate business analysis techniques
- Identifying stakeholders and planning for stakeholder meetings
- How business analysis information will be captured, stored and used
- Determine how the information captured will be made available in order to make collaborative decisions
- Determine how business analysis work will be monitored and can be improved over time
- How to create a stakeholder map
Eliciting Requirements and Working with Stakeholders
- Communicating what will be needed from the stakeholders
- Conducting elicitation activities
- Confirming the outcomes of elicitation activities
- Understanding the needs of stakeholders
- Providing the stakeholders with relevant information
- Keeping stakeholders engaged throughout the business analysis process
Requirements Lifecycle Management
- How to maintain traceability between requirements, designs, solution components and other work products
- Ensuring that requirements and designs are cohesive, complete, consistent, and correct
- Facilitating the reuse of requirements and designs when feasible
- Understanding how to assign a value, priority, and risk to requirements and designs
- Evaluating new and changing stakeholder needs
- Helping stakeholders reach agreement on requirements and designs
Strategy Analysis
- Understanding the business need and the context for change
- Determining objectives, and identifying what needs to change in order to meet these objectives
- Identifying the options for reaching the desired future state, and determining any potential transitional states required
- How to leverage the following techniques:
- Developing a Business Case
- Conducting a formal Risk Assessment
Requirements Analysis and Design
- How to communicate requirements using various analytical and visual techniques
- Ensuring that requirements and designs are of high quality
- Ensuring that requirements and designs deliver business value
- Structuring requirements and designs so they cohesively support the business purpose
- How to leverage the following techniques:
- Data Flow Diagram
- Process Modeling
- User Story Map / User Stories
- Use Cases / Storyboards
Solution Evaluation
- How to identify potential solutions
- How to recommend the solution that will provide the greatest overall value
- Determining how the performance of a solution will be assessed
- Assessing solution performance to understand value delivered
- Investigating internal and external solution issues that may be leading to poor performance
- Identify actions that can be taken to increase the value delivered by a solution
- How to leverage the following techniques:
- Acceptance Criteria
- Evaluation Criteria / Vendor Assessment
- Determining Non Functional Requirements
If you’re going to pay by credit card, you can either get started with installment payments or pay in full. Just let your enrollment representative know the option that works best for you.
Corporate Tuition Assistance
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Corporate TA
Corporate tuition assistance is paid by your employer. You will need to provide appropriate forms for processing, prior to enrollment. Subject to employer benefit policies.
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Deferred Corporate TA
Pay tuition now and have your employer reimburse you. Additional documentation will be needed to process this payment. Subject to employer benefit policies.
Military Benefits
Active Duty
Villanova offers a 15% savings, per certificate course, to active-duty servicemembers, Guardsmen and Reservists (upon verification of military status).
Veterans
Villanova offers a 15% savings, per certificate course to veterans (upon verification of military status). You may also use your Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) education benefits for many of Villanova’s 100% online non-credit programs, based upon your individual eligibility.
Spouses and Dependents
Villanova offers a 15% savings, per certificate course, to active-duty servicemembers, veterans, Guardsmen, Reservists and their spouses and dependents (upon verification of military status).
This reduction is valid off the standard tuition fee rate of the listed courses offered by Villanova University with online administration by Bisk. This reduction is not stackable with other reductions, and you may not use this reduction in conjunction with other reductions.
