Models, Frameworks, and Business Analysis Essentials

Stuff every Business Analyst needs to Know

Being a business analyst is not easy, and many common techniques for defining functional requirements don’t make it any easier. At one extreme are simplistic list-based approaches that are too imprecise, incomplete, and inconsistent for all but the simplest applications. Think of those documents with endless lists of requirements, all beginning with “the system shall…” At the other extreme are complex techniques that are indecipherable to most users and analysts, and thus produce results that are equally undependable. On top of that, most literature on business analysis doesn’t cover the “tips of the trade” – those frameworks and techniques experienced analysts seem to draw on effortlessly.

What we need are techniques that are repeatable by analysts, understandable and relevant to subject matter experts, and useful to designers and developers. They should also play well together, offer well-defined progressive levels of detail, and be practical enough that you can achieve good results within your natural lifetime!

That sounds challenging, but experience shows it is achievable. This two-day workshop shows how to discover, document, and verify requirements using a small number of business-friendly yet powerful modelling techniques. After a quick review of bad advice in the world of business analysis, the consequences of applying it, and why it just doesn’t work, we will experience four integrated modelling techniques, each providing a different lens into the problem space:

• Process Scope and Process Workflow Models – what the business processes are, how they work now, and how they should work, and why knowing this is critical to Business Analysis.
• Concept Models (Conceptual Data Models) – the things and facts about things the business needs to know to support processes, applications, and reporting and analytics.
• User Stories and Use Cases – how the application should behave externally in support of the people and processes using it.
• Business Services and Business Events – what the application should do internally regardless of who is using it or how.

The material is drawn from our primary courses for business analysts – Working With Business Processes, Business-Oriented Data Modelling, and especially Requirements Modelling with Use Cases and Services. We assume some familiarity with Process and Concept Models, so the emphasis will be on Business Events, User Stories/Use Cases, and Business Services.

In addition, it introduces the frameworks and techniques experienced analysts draw on effortlessly. These include “The Magical Number 7,” “Visual Literacy,” “Essentials of Facilitation,” “The Principle of Constructive Ignorance,” “Environmental Scans,” and more.

This workshop covers what really works, not textbook theory about what should work or what might work. You’ll get proven methods, guidelines, templates, and tips to achieve quality results and maximum involvement of subject matter experts. This workshop was developed by practitioners, for practitioners, and the techniques have been refined and proven over many years of real-world experience. Attend, and give your career an edge!

Prerequisites:

None, although some understanding of Business Process Modelling and Concept Modelling (Conceptual Data Modelling) will be helpful but not mandatory – the workshop reviews the essentials.

Course Topics

• Requirements definition – goals, issues, and an integrating framework that works in real life
• Progressive levels of detail for each technique in the framework – Scope, Concept, Detail
• Applying the framework in an Agile setting – what to do and what not to do
• Recap – identifying, scoping, assessing, and mapping Business Processes
• Recap – building a common language and “world view” with business-friendly Concept Models
• How Process Models provide context, and Concept Models provide a foundation for requirements
• Using a Concept Model to discover the necessary Business Events, Services, and Use Cases
• Service Specifications – validation, business rules, data updates, and other internal behaviours
• Multiple approaches for discovering essential services
• Use Cases – discovering user expectations about a system’s external behaviour
• Discovering use cases and services at the right granularity – a multi-pronged method
• Documenting use cases with progressive detail and precision – a phased approach
• Avoiding the “Useless Case” phenomenon – ensuring your use cases are actually useful
• Developing use case dialogues – the “when – then” approach and why it works
• Throughout, Business Analysis frameworks and techniques will be demonstrated with real-life examples. These include “The magical number 7,” “Better diagrams through visual literacy,” “Essentials of facilitation, in-person and virtual,” “The principle of constructive ignorance,” “Essence vs. accident,” “Bottom-up techniques, and why they work,” “Stay on CoRSE – Collect, Reduce, Sequence, Expand,” and more.
• Wrap-up – summary and resources.

Who is it for?

Business analysts, UX designers, systems analysts, and solution architects or developers responsible for the analysis and design of any component of an application, including application logic and the user interface, or for documenting legacy/custom/packaged application behavior in a structured way. Also, technical resources and project leaders needing to understand current business analysis techniques, and content experts with a significant role in specifying requirements.
Those who have attended the Data Modelling or Workflow Modelling classes by Alec Sharp will also benefit from this course. Why? Because it provides additional skills, including the all-important “soft skills,” to build on their data and process expertise and contribute to real improvement at their organisations.