Availability

For training information and workshop outlines, call 773-227-7110 x106

At A Glance

These workshops are available for in-house tailoring to help organizations perform target skill building. Their usage maps to project archetypes that identify patterns for tackling common business analysis activities.

Available Workshops

• Requirements Capture and Refactoring
  Eliciting and capturing requirements is only the first step in understanding the needs of the stakeholder. There are a series of additional analysis steps that the BA should apply to tease out additional information from raw stakeholder requests. This workshop teaches the appropriate categorization and refactoring techniques to ensure that the BA more thoroughly analyzes requirements to deliver discrete atomic level requirements that are clear, consistent and traceable to the stakeholders original requests and downstream software specifications.

• Requirements Traceability and Management
  Having a clear and easy to understand approach to performing traceability between different elements within the requirements artifacts and software specifications is a critical success factor for requirements capture and validation. This workshop provides a deep dive into how to develop and apply the appropriate traceability strategy and requirements management plan when creating BA deliverables.

• Use Case Modeling
  Use case modeling is one technique for capturing the functional flow of usage scenarios between a user (actor) and (usually) an automation solution that is either being built from scratch or enhanced. Business analysts can use the use case modeling technique to further elaborate business requirements (Stakeholder Requests); to help with requirements refactoring (Stakeholder Requests into Functional Requirements, to name one); or to simply elaborate the user experience of an actor. This workshop teaches the student how to use business scenarios as the source for developing a Use Case Survey and a Use Case Model. It also addresses how to identify primary, alternate and exception pathways for each use case. Third, it instructs the student in proper writing technique for documenting the functional flow of each pathway. Last, it addresses how use cases can be linked to other framework artifacts, such as business scenarios, usage scenarios, business rules, navigation models, and authorities and roles.

• Usage Scenario Modeling
  A usage scenario-based approach to requirements analysis and specification development is essential to validating the steps involved in supporting key end-user interactions in order to assure that all the elements required to deliver the specified behavior is aligned. This approach also provides a cross-check between the definition of user interfaces and the supporting and supporting abstract services. This workshop walks through an approach that BAs can utilize to identify and specify scenarios that can be used to create higher quality requirements and specifications while providing testers with better input to developing test cases.

• Technology Scenario Modeling
  A technology scenario-based approach to system interaction requirements is essential to validating how services and/or components interact and depend upon each other to deliver identified scenarios. This approach also provides a cross-check between the definitions of these service and/or components and the user-interactions or system-events which trigger them as well as establishing a basis for establishing end-to-end quality of service measures. This workshop walks through an approach that BAs can utilize to identify and specify scenarios that can be used to create higher quality requirements and specifications while providing testers with better input to developing test cases.

• Navigation Modeling
  Automation solutions (either existing applications or new ones) that are user experience intensive often have demanding requirements for capturing the user experience. One aspect of user experience is driven by the orderly presentment of business information. The flow of user interface screens (and sub screens) is an important analysis challenge for the business analyst (or user experience modeler). This workshop introduces the concept of capturing and modeling user interfaces of the applications being analyzed. Topics addressed include: refactoring Usability Requirements from Stakeholder Requests (covered in detail in Requirements Capture and Refactoring workshop); identifying logical user interface screens and their display elements and user actions; capturing relationships between one UI screen and others; capturing UI navigation paths; understanding how to use business scenarios and use cases to help determine the orderly navigation of UI screens. The workshop also briefly addresses advanced user experience modeling concepts such as UI context, mapping if UI display elements to business entities. Finally, it also covers the basic relationships of Navigation Model elements to other framework artifacts, notably, business entities; business entity attributes; screen mockups; business service controllers, usage scenarios, use cases, and authority and roles.

• Business Entity Modeling
  Most if not all business automation projects (whether new applications or enhancements to existing applications) deal with business information Business requirements (Stakeholder Requests) almost always are expressed using business terms and phrases. These terms and phrases are often expressed either formally or (as is usually the case) informally. Business analyst must recognize the need to formally define business terms and business attributes. Even more important, they must be able to understand how these business terms relate to one another. Being able to elaborate how business information and its inherent relationships impact the automation solutions is critical to quality of a business solution specification. This workshop addresses these challenges for the business analyst. It teaches the student to mine Stakeholder Requests for business entities and their attributes. It then addresses how the student should find and model the relationships between those business entities, and then document them using Entity Attribute Requirements and Entity Diagrams. Finally, it also covers the basic relationships of business entities and attributes to other framework artifacts, notably, business rules, user interface display elements, glossary of terms, and authority and roles.

• Applying Project Archetypes
  This workshop covers a mechanism for characterizing projects based on the needs of the business and the constraints of the business organization, the organization's business processes and workflows, the existing IT platforms in place (if applicable), and architectural considerations (i.e. SOA). Each project archetype recommends a pattern, or lifeline, through the Business Analysis Framework so the BA's analysis (and subsequent work products) is right-sized to the complexity and scope of the business requirements.