The Lean and Agile mindsets and their practices give the Business Analyst new and powerful tools for quickly determining precisely what to build. Traditional system-development methodologies are just not responsive enough to the ever increasing pace of change. Building a system based on yesterday’s needs is not a success even if delivered on time and on budget. This indispensable course explores the critical need for good requirements development in an Agile environment and equips business analysts with the critical thinking, analytical skills, and necessary people skills they need to add value to every Agile project.
This practical workshop provides participants with an understanding of the changing role of the business analyst as a co-creator of requirements rather than as an order taker. Participants learn the tools and techniques best suited to Agile, and the timing for performing key tasks and events. Explanatory, demonstrations, and practice exercises will provide you with the experience needed to create user stories that meet business needs.
The International Consortium for Agile has worked with experts around the world to develop an education roadmap of training and certification for all specialties involved in Agile development. This course has been approved and earns students the ICAgile Certified Professional in Business Value Analysis designation upon successful completion of the course.
Completion of this workshop satisfies part of the requirements for IC-Agile’s ICP-APO certification.
Objectives
Audience
If you're involved at all with Agile projects or you want to learn more about how to incorporate Agile approaches into your projects, you simply must participate in this workshop.
As we get started we will get to know each other and understand the objectives of the course. We will introduce the importance of Conversation in the Agile environment and how the Conversation can be managed for better communication and results. We will model the creation of Working Agreements that contribute to building trust on a team.
You’ve heard it all before: “Agile means developing software without any documentation. Agile means developers decide on a product’s features. Agile is the same thing as Scrum.” Perhaps you’ve heard the most misleading concept of all: “Agile means we don’t do business analysis anymore.” Nothing could be more false.
Learn what Agile really is, what the variations and hybrids of Agile are, and how business analysis is critical to project success.
In Agile the Business Analyst has various possible roles from Voice of the Customer or Product Owner, member of the Customer side team, or member of the Development side team. In this section, we will explore how to create an effective Agile team with an Agile mindset and then see how the Business Analyst fits into this team framework and provides value.
Agile follows an Adaptive, Just-in-Time planning model. In this section, we will learn how Adaptive Planning can better meet the customer’s needs and provide them more value with fewer resources by only elaborating requirements Just-in-Time.
The Agile vehicle of communicating requirements is the User Story. The Business Analyst is central in the process of writing and elaborating User Stories. This section will help the Business Analyst learn about User Stories and how to write and elaborate good User Stories.
After User Stories are written, they need to be prioritized and estimated. As part of the Customer side team, the BA has a major role in prioritization. As a member of the Development side team, the BA will contribute to User Story estimation. Both of these come with low cost, low waste techniques that allow us to do this quickly and get on to the important work of implementing requirements.
The Business needs to know when they will receive product deliverables. In this section, the Business Analyst will learn how milestones are set and how deliverables will be slated for a release with high confidence in meeting dates.
Backlog Refinement is where the Business Analyst is really worth their weight in gold. User Stories represent very thin statements of Customer wants and needs but they don’t contain the details until the development team is close to working on them. As the time to work on them approaches, the details need to be filled in and the Business Analyst is the central figure in requirements elaboration.
When Requirements are ready to go – ready to go does not mean mountains of documentation. Much of the details are maintained as tacit knowledge with the Business Analyst and the others who have been involved with the Conversation. Continued collaboration is essential to turning what we’ve learned about the needs of the customer into working software. The Business Analyst is always there involved in answering real-time questions from the team.
Agile is an Empirical Process for developing complex software. Essential to an Empirical Process is feedback loops. Feedback loops can be both formal and more informal. In this section, we will learn about the formal feedback loops that are built into the end-of-iteration timeframe for driving continuous improvement back into the process.
So you want to drive these concepts into your organization as you leave the class and go back to your work. This section will help you do that effectively.
Course Comments
Gain 14 PMP PDUs upon successful course completion
Please call for Group Rate for 3 or more registrations.
If class start date is less than 5 business days from today, please call for pricing.
Upcoming Classes
December 04, 2024
December 18, 2024
January 08, 2025
February 12, 2025
March 10, 2025
April 07, 2025
May 19, 2025