Developing Analytical Competence To Manage Operations

Course Content
Module 1
Defining Business Analysis (Overview of the business analysis discipline)
o    Key roles and responsibilities
o    Distinguishing between business analysis and other related disciplines
o    Introducing the business analysis framework
o    Gathering business needs at the organizational or department levels
o    Performing needs-analysis
o    Choosing the best elicitation technique
o    Soliciting enterprise-level contextual analysis
o    Identifying the nine elicitation techniques
o    Verifying the necessary steps to gather information
o    Recording and confirming elicitation results

Conducting Enterprise Analysis (Analyzing the business landscape)
o    Categorizing and prioritizing business needs and issues using affinity diagrams
o    Assessing business capabilities and gaps
o    Detecting problems and finding opportunities
o    Exposing root causes of problems
o    Finding opportunities for growth
o    Identifying elements of the initial solution scope
o    Developing action-oriented business initiatives
o    Prioritization matrices
o    Anticipating project benefits and costs
o    Documenting critical Business parameters
o    Building SMART Business objectives
o    Specifying critical project elements and deliverables

Planning and Monitoring the Business Analysis Process (Planning for requirements analysis)
o    Documenting assumptions, ground rules and templates
o    Producing a requirements development plan to guide and manage the process
o    Building the communication plan
o    Performing stakeholder analysis
o    Identifying key stakeholders
o    Analyzing the impact stakeholders have on a project
o    Developing a change management process
o    Baselining your plan
o    Following the defined change management process
o    Managing the change control process

Module 2
Managing and Communicating Requirements (Analyzing requirements)
o    Verifying, prioritizing and organizing requirements
o    Specifying the requirements document
o    Identifying key relationships using traceability
o    Executing the communication plan
o    Addressing common pitfalls typically encountered during requirements development
o    Validating the requirements document with key stakeholders
o    Managing stakeholder agreement and conflict

Assessing and Validating Solutions (Allocating requirements)
o    Optimizing business value
o    Evaluating dependencies between requirements
o    Assessing organizational readiness
o    Identifying organizational capability gaps
o    Defining business and technical organizational impacts
o   Building the Business Process Improvement (BPI) Framework
o    Defining BPI
o    Business process improvement vs. re-engineering
o    BPI as a driving innovator in organizations
o    Uncovering BPI challenges
o    Analyzing your personal BPI skills
o    Assessing BPI in your organization

Identifying Key Business Drivers
o    Developing business requirements
o    Analyzing the needs of key stakeholders
o    Defining the four key requirements
o    Deploying enterprise analysis tools
o    Identifying influences on the business
o    MOST
o    Five forces
o    PESTLE
o    SWOT
o    Designing appropriate measurements
o    Linking business drivers to measurements
o    Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs)
o    Outlining the “As-Is Process” (Applying principles of business process modeling)
o    Defining modeling principles
o    Evaluating different modeling techniques
o    Determining the level of detail for your process
o    Enhancing your modeling skills
o    Applying a cross-functional activity diagram

Module3
Managing and Communicating Requirements (Analyzing requirements)
o    Verifying, prioritizing and organizing requirements
o    Specifying the requirements document
o    Identifying key relationships using traceability
o    Executing the communication plan
o    Addressing common pitfalls typically encountered during requirements development
o    Validating the requirements document with key stakeholders
o    Managing stakeholder agreement and conflict

Assessing and Validating Solutions (Allocating requirements)
o    Optimizing business value
o    Evaluating dependencies between requirements
o    Assessing organizational readiness
o    Identifying organizational capability gaps
o    Defining business and technical organizational impacts
o   Building the Business Process Improvement (BPI) Framework
o    Defining BPI
o    Business process improvement vs. re-engineering
o    BPI as a driving innovator in organizations
o    Uncovering BPI challenges
o    Analyzing your personal BPI skills
o    Assessing BPI in your organization

Discovering Process Improvements (Relating process measures to business drivers)
o    Analyzing process performance
o    Linking processes to your business
o    Recognizing the causes of poor process performance
o    Time
o   Cost