Duration: 2 Days

Those who perform business analysis functions in organizations provide an essential function by capturing the requirements for a project, designing the solutions, and ensuring the defined scope meets the customer’s needs, goals and objectives. This practical introduction will provide participants with proven analysis tools and techniques, including methods to define the problem using a systematic approach, analyze the business process, and create a conceptual solution that is applicable in virtually any software environment. This repeatable framework will ensure your requirements are consistently complete and accurate. Pragmatic solutions to keep the customer involved in the process include facilitation, questioning, listening, business need identification, communication, culture analysis, stakeholder engagement, problem solving, and presentation of the most feasible solution.

Target Audience
Business Analyst, Business Systems Analyst, Systems Analyst, Project Manager, Systems Architect or Designer, Systems or Application Developer, Systems Tester, Leader of systems project or team, Change Agents & Change Management team members.

Course Objectives

• Comprehend the shifting role of a Business Analyst
• Define your business and systems processes
• Select the appropriate model for your process, choosing the right technique for your type of system
• Identify the scope of the project
• Understand, analyze, and articulate the as-built and future-state system
• Target your analysis and understand the consequence of the solutions
• Gather required information through multiple methods
• Conduct efficient interviews
• Ask targeted questions to discover the root causes, not just symptoms
• Conduct effective sessions to capture and verify requirements
• Improve the quality of the requirements elicited
• Use consistent documentation based on industry best practices
• Present clear, unambiguous potential solutions to real business needs
• Use visual representations of the business process, workflows, and data models to ensure clarity
• Improve communication skills through hands-on practice e clarity
• Apply analysis techniques to any methodology or data modeling
• Bridge the communication gap between business people and technology solution providers
• Understanding business culture and how this can impact the success of the project

Course Outline
• The Business Case for Business Analysis
• Introduction to Business Analysis
• Project Initiation
• Understand the System
• Analyzing Existing System Components
• Defining Future State Components and Process Details
• Writing Requirements for the Future State

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Duration: 2 Days

Get project requirements right the first time, every time, using these state-of-the-art techniques!

Ensure that scope is under control from the outset — even on complex projects. Prevent expensive errors and omissions in requirements with a proven approach and methodology. Practice real-world tools and techniques for immediate application.

Target Audience
If you’re involved at all in defining and managing systems development projects, you will find this workshop invaluable:
• Business customer, user or partner
• IT Manager or Director
• Business Analyst
• Developer or Programmer
• Business Systems Analyst
• QA Manager or Director
• Systems Analyst
• Project Manager
• Architect or Designer
• Systems or Application Developer
• Systems Tester
• Leader of Systems projects or teams

Course Outline
1. Use Cases and the Requirements Problem
This section presents an overview of the requirements challenges inherent in IT projects and how a use case approach can overcome them.

2. Introduction to Requirements Development with Use Cases
Use cases are one of the best approaches for developing requirements. Here we’ll review key definitions and terms, overview a requirements-management framework and see how use cases fit into the development life cycle.

3. Use Cases and IT Project Initiation
To apply use cases successfully, you should plan for them from the very beginning. This section explores project initiation and its relationship to use cases. In particular, you’ll examine how to define a business problem, identify stakeholders, and determine initial project scope. You’ll also learn about a tool for graphically depicting project scope.

4. How Use Cases Are Developed and Organized
This section of the course will clarify when use cases should be applied, describe the discovery and organization of use cases, examine further the relationship between stakeholders’ requirements and use cases, and provide guidance for how to determine the level of detail appropriate for a project.

5. Requirements Elicitation and Key Elements of Use Cases
Use cases are typically developed as business requirements are elicited and discovered. In this section of the workshop, we examine requirements elicitation, its relation to use case development, and some important tools.

6. Documenting Requirements with Use Cases
This section of the workshop focuses on how to apply the knowledge you’ve gained so far to writing a use case. It also examines more complex aspects of uses cases, including extend relationships and use case linking on larger systems.

7. Improving Functional Requirements and Use Cases
Analysts must know how to organize the use cases and requirements in a Software Requirements Specification and how to assure quality. Here we will apply standards for quality to our use cases and requirements, look at some proven ways to prevent common problems, and explore how to derive maximum benefit from reviews.

8. Use Cases and System Requirements
In this section, we will examine ways to derive system requirements from functional requirements and use cases and how to identify constraints on the solution design. We’ll also explore how use cases not only trace back to requirements, but also how they trace forward through the development life cycle to design and testing.

9. Applying Use Cases on Real Projects
Without application, the learning is merely academic. In the final section, you will discuss how to employ use cases on real IT projects. The capstone of your two-day investment will be an individualized action plan for putting the power of use cases to work on your projects and in your organizational environment.

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Duration: 2 Days

UML (Unified Modeling Language) is a dynamic, flexible, and standardized language that can be used to model many scenarios and applications. Business Systems are the underlying engines that run all businesses. Creating, changing, optimizing and maintaining these systems will be improved with the use of UML. UML gives a commonly understood platform that all members of a company can use. In this course we take a look at a method of defining, eliciting information about the systems, and using UML to model those systems with an aim to giving management better control over their business.

UML modeling allows for the finding of potential areas of change, such as:

• Inefficiencies
• Performance issues
• Redundant processes
• Incorrect or conflicting business rules
• Areas of risk/exposure to your business systems
• Potential areas of consolidation
• Underutilized/over-utilized systems and people

Target Audience

• Business Analyst who needs to define or gather user’s business requirements
• Business Systems Analyst who wants to understand userÕs business requirements, translate them into clear statements of functional and systems requirements and add value to IT projects.
• Systems Analyst who must develop correct technical specifications from functional and system requirements
• System Auditors who are responsible for making sure that a company’s systems are working exactly as defined by the company’s needs
• Compliance officers who are responsible for making sure that the company policies, systems and actions do not violate regulations, rules and laws.
• Risk Managers who are responsible for assessing company vulnerabilities and other areas of risks posed by changes and implementations of business systems and rules
• Project Managers who must ensure that a projectÕs team members correctly understand customer needs and deliver high-quality solutions within project constraints
• Database Developers who must develop correct database specifications for business use from user requirements.
• Business Owners who want to understand the interoperations of their businesses so that they can solve business problems and work more effectively.
• Six Sigma/Lean Sigma Practitioners who want to increase the effectiveness of their efforts.
• Independent IT/Telecom/Business Consultants who want to accurately capture the expectations of the customer before designing a system, network or process.
• Web page/GUI Interface designers who must design and develop interactive web pages and applications

Course Objectives
1. Learn to design so that you can accommodate unplanned changes.
2. Create a well-documented design so that others who are new to the design can still work with it.
3. Have a visual model of an architecture to help you determine implications of changes.
4. Have a common way to understand what needs to be built to help teams of different organizations, languages, and countries communicate effectively to successfully deliver an application that is on time and, more importantly, meets the requirements of the end users.
5. Model your business and its legacy applications to help minimize the costs and impact on productivity when software is transitioned to new staff members.
6. Creating a clear model of how your systems are to be used operationally will reduce the learning curve of new users.
7. Avoid unnecessary maintenance due to operator error or misunderstanding.
8. Model your business to clarify how different parts of your operations interact.
9. Learn to make your business rules explicit.
10. Building an enterprise architecture helps you understand what exists within your organization, including software, hardware, business processes, and organizational resources.
12. Providing a view of your enterprise architecture to others helps to ensure interoperability across organizations.
13. Learn how to use modeling techniques in creative ways to extract greater value from them.
14. Learn how to identify stakeholders when modeling and designing systems.
15. Learn how to quickly and easily find the root cause of a system problem.
16. Get hands-on experience using the different types of diagrams available for system design.
17. Learn how to affect changes in your organization and introduce UML as a “common language”.
18. Learn how to use UML for your specific job function.
19. Learn how to define and create your own company UML “dictionary”.

Course Outline

Defining Business Systems
In any business there can be a significant number of systems that aren’t necessarily associated with business functions. These systems must be identified and documented as part of the complete requirement specification.

Analyzing Business Systems
Projects arise in part to solve problems with business systems, and understanding the underlying problem or problems is therefore key to being able to identify the correct requirements. During this section, you will refresh your knowledge of and practice applying a five-step analysis method.

Modeling Business Systems
Savvy analysts and project team members have a variety of techniques for analyzing business problems. This section introduces three of the most powerful and effective analysis techniques and discusses their use in requirements elicitation.

What is UML?
The UML (Unified Modeling Language) is one of the most exciting and useful tools in the world of system development. In the past system analysts would try to determine the needs of clients and note those needs in some notation that was often personal to the analyst when sending to the programmers. This could lead to indeterminate needs, incorrect designs and a costly amount of miscommunications between customer, analyst, and designer/programmer. With the UML the design process is organized in an orderly manner that is understood by all.

Modeling and Analysis with UML
We will demonstrate hands-on application of the differing ways that UML can be used in the business environment. In this workshop you will get actual hands on experience in designing different types of models with UML. The class will work in groups to design a system based upon the needs of the organization.

Applying UML to Your Specific Job Function
While UML is a powerful tool and is very adept at differing modeling scenarios, you will want to know how to use it for their own specific purposes. Whether for your specific job function, your department or company as a whole.

Defining Your Own Company UML Library
Attendees who bring their own laptops can experience the hands-on benefits of creating their own library of diagrams, tools and templates for use in their personal corporate environment.

Integrating UML into Your Company Practices
For many, the question left after attending the seminar is how to get your company to buy into the deployment of UML on all appropriate levels of the organization. In this section we will discuss processes and plans to get your company to buy into and even implement a training program.

January 23-24, 2008

UML (Unified Modeling Language) is a dynamic, flexible, and standardized language that can be used to model many scenarios and applications. Business Systems are the underlying engines that run all businesses. Creating, changing, optimizing and maintaining these systems will be improved with the use of UML. UML provides a commonly understood platform that all members of a company can use.

In this course we take a look at methods of defining systems, eliciting information about them, and using UML to model systems. The overall objective is to increase business productivity and efficiency.