Overview

Creating business requirements for data and process is a difficult task for any development effort. For a data warehouse or other decision support endeavor this task is complicated by a traditional focus on transaction process requirements development practices.

This course focuses on how to gather, define and document business requirements and perform analysis for data warehousing and related decision support applications. The course consists of an introduction to the business analyst function and proceeds to develop skill sets needed for gathering, documenting and analyzing requirements for any decision support initiative, including the development of appropriate meta data and non-functional requirements. In a workshop format, students will learn concepts of requirements management and their applicability to the data warehousing environment.

Benefits To Your Company

This training will allow your business analysts:

• To establish and inform customers and stakeholders what the system must do
• To provide architects and developers with a strong understanding of the system requirements
• To define and limit the boundaries or scope of the system
• To specify a user interface that meets system needs and goals
• To provide a basis for determining the scope and content of future development iterations
• To facilitate cost and resource estimation

The end result is that project requirements are better defined and documented, helping to ensure project success.

Who Should Attend

• Business systems analysts
• Data or process analysts
• Test engineers
• Business unit managers
• Solution architects
• Business information managers
• Data architects

Learning Objectives

• Develop skills in eliciting and defining business requirements for data warehousing projects
• Provide an understanding of the documentation techniques, principles, terminology and concepts
• Provide practical group and individual exercises for requirements gathering and interpreting them in view of the decision support needs of the organization
• Supply sample agendas, scripts and templates describing how to capture the various deliverables throughout the discovery phase
• Simulate the business requirements process by giving each seminar participant the opportunity to participate in exercises and be critiqued by the instructor

Attendees will learn to...

• Develop solutions to your own data warehousing and other information systems projects requirements needs
• Create the artifacts of any requirements management project
• Learn how to work collaboratively to discover and refine business requirements

What Makes This Certified Course Unique

This EWSolutions-certified class is workshop-focused since design concepts are best learned from doing. The final workshops are oriented to solving the problems that you have in your current projects. The workshops allow you to learn how the concepts are applied and how to develop skills in business requirements management for decision support and data warehousing systems.

Course Outline

1. Introduction
2. Overview of data warehousing and decision support systems
3. Project management for business analysis in data warehousing
4. Key principles and concepts in requirements management
   • Effective versus poor requirements at various levels
   • The types of requirements and their places in the development process
   • Advantages and disadvantages of each discovery technique and methods for using them on a data warehouse or other information systems project
5. Gathering and structuring data warehouse requirements
   • Techniques used to gather and structure types of requirements
     • Interviews
     • Questionnaires
     • Workgroup / JAD sessions
     • Surveys and observations
   • Use cases as a method for gathering and documenting requirements
6. Overview of data warehouse logical data modeling
7. Reading a logical data model
8. Introduction to building a logical data model for data warehousing
   • Project initiation
   • Entity type definition
   • Case study exercise
   • Relationship type definition
   • Entity-level diagrams
9. Case study exercise
10. Key attribute type definition
    • Identifying key attributes
    • Defining key attributes
    • Redefining relationships
11. Case study exercise
12. Non-key attribute type definition
    • Identifying and defining non-key attributes
    • Producing a fully refined logical data model
    • Case study exercise
13. Fundamentals of logical process modeling for decision support systems
    • Objectives and modeling definitions
    • Process modeling techniques
14. Building diagrams
    • Identifying functions, external objects, and information views
    • Case study exercise for building diagrams
15. Building process flows and data flow diagrams for decision support systems
    • Objectives, definitions, and types of dependencies
    • Identifying external objects, data stores, and information views
    • Agendas, scripts, templates, and facilitation techniques
    • Case study exercise building the process flow and data flow diagrams in a data warehouse project
    • Case study exercise building the action diagram for a process
16. Additional information used in data warehousing business analysis
    • Metadata and its role in information systems
    • Storage and access to metadata for data warehousing
    • Repositories and their strengths and limitations
17. Facilitating for decision support business requirements
    • JAD approaches for data and process requirements gathering techniques
    • Agendas, scripts, templates, and facilitation techniques for requirements meetings and focus groups
18. Documenting data warehousing user requirements
    • Developing appropriate documentation for various user and technical functions
    • Using requirements for informative communication throughout the project’s lifecycle
    • Transforming requirements into specifications
      • Differences between requirements and specifications
      • Techniques for transformation and use as foundation for application development
19. Workshop conclusion
    • Summary, additional exercises, sources for further reading, etc.

Standard Duration

• 3 days (may be customized as needed)

To learn more about how EWSolutions can provide our World-Class Training for your company or to request a quote, please feel free to contact Dr. Anne Marie Smith, our Director of Education at AMSmith@EWSolutions.com or call her at 856.468.6194

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