Upcoming Chicagoland Public Classroom Schedule

April 25th, 2008 | Practical Approaches to Business Rules
May 15th– 16th, 2008 | Elicitation of Requirements & Business Solution Specification Fundamentals

Click here to view Enterprise Agility's Public Classroom Schedule Information.

For detailed course outlines, group discounts, on-site training, mentoring and tailoring, contact us at 773-227-7110 x106.

The New Role of the Business Analyst. Are You Ready?

The Business Analyst role is evolving. Today, more demands are heaped upon Business Analysts than ever before. And, as organizations embrace approaches, such as SOA, agile, business rules and process orchestration, business analysts must confront the challenge to adapt these methods and techniques to support such approaches. The centerpiece of this evolution is the movement by organizations to redefine the collaboration between their business and IT organizations. This is evidenced by the marked increase in the number of business/IT liaison roles in organizations throughout the U.S.

Issues with Today's Conventional Business Analyst Training

Unfortunately, conventional business analyst training being offered in today’s marketplace falls short in addressing critical elements necessary to optimize new technology enablers while giving IT implementers what they need to succeed. The shortfall can be attributed to the often fragmented methods and techniques delivered by today’s business analyst training courses. In many companies today, there is an increased need to address the links and dependencies between the disciplines of implementing business and software change.

A New Generation of Business Analyst Training

Enterprise Agility’s training and mentoring delivers a comprehensive approach for defining business specifications that are understandable by the business and provide IT architects and designers valid, complete and consistent specifications. The Enterprise Agility Business Specification Training is based on a business analysis framework and maturity model that has been developed from years of work with major organizations throughout the U.S. and is rooted in hands-on practical experience with large and mid-size organizations.

Our training is conceived and designed to address several problems encountered by past and present clients:

Training That's Generalized But Specialized Training programs offered by independent software vendors (ISV) can be valuable for basic learning of tools and techniques that closely fit the products being marketed by the ISV. We recommend numerous ISV courses to our clients when the fit and need are correct. However, to appeal to a broad audience and to maximize investment in the course syllabus, training courses are often too general for many of the students attending the course. What's more, the training is focused on product, not solving specific real-world problems. The one-size-fits-all approach is often ill-fitting when an organization has specific needs that must be tailored to a project. EA Training Programs help bring knowledge to your project team that's expressed in the everyday language of your business.

Lack of Internalization of Things Learned Many students frequently lament that it's often difficult to transform what they're learning in the classroom to what they're doing on the job. Well meaning instructors do their best to use examples that might apply to specific problems, but it's difficult at best when there are 20 students from diverse backgrounds. Because the EA Training Programs are delivered on-site with pre-planning of syllabus delivery, workshop design and problem identification, students more easily internalize what they're learning.

Timing of Training Regularly scheduled courses from vendors often are not timely when it comes to applying what you've learned in class to the project you're working on. If you're not ready to apply what you've learned within two weeks of class, you stand to lose much of what you learned. EA Training Programs can be implemented as part of your project plan at the inception of the project so they're integrated with stakeholder expectations and tied immediately to analysis and development activities.

The Anatomy of Enterprise Agility's Training

Focus Plan We work with you to develop a plan of attack to make sure that we understand the five most important factors to delivering successful training : stakeholder expectations; specific learning needs of project team; project work and learning environment; project structure and milestones; desired outcomes. A Focus Plan is an agreement of approach to deliver one or more training programs. It helps set expectations among all participants and defines what will be delivered. It is the road map for the remaining delivery components that follow.

Topical Presentations Each training program features one to several short (one to three hour) presentations designed to set the stage for what is to be learned in the collaborative workshops. While the Topical Presentations canvass subject matter to be consumed in the workshops, they are deliberately designed to be short in duration due to our enduring belief that classroom lectures deliver less learning value than proactive workshops. Once the Topical Presentations are given, the students work with their instructor to help shape how the workshops will be conducted. The instructor knows the subject matter and the Focus Plan; the students know their domain and can internalize how they might best collaborate.

Collaborative Workshops Workshops are designed to focus on maximum absorption of topical matter while applying what's learned to real project problems. The number of workshops will vary based on specific needs and size of project team. Each training program has a specific facilitated workshop framework that is applied to the project using the Focus Plan.

On-Board Mentoring Integrated with the Collaborative Workshops and persisting into the project are mentoring activities that take the Enterprise Agility consultant "on-board" the project as a team member. Mentoring is most effective when it's done hand-in-hand, with mentor and mentee having the same investment in the success of the project. Depending on your specific project needs and the size of your team, more than one mentor may be required.

Knowledge Transfer As the time progresses, project team members gain steady footing on their roles and responsibilities and develop into self-reliant contributors. Though Knowledge Transfer has been a continuous process throughout On-Board Mentoring, the process continues by documenting lessons learned, formalizing learning assets and developing specific frameworks so that future training programs can be repeatable for new team members or other project teams altogether.

To Learn More

For detailed course outlines, group discounts, on-site training, mentoring and tailoring, contact us at 773-227-7110 x106.