Objectives

The objectives of the seminar are to:

• Develop skills in eliciting and defining business requirements for any project
• Provide an understanding of the documentation techniques, principles, terminology and concepts
• Provide practical group and individual exercises for requirements gathering and interpreting them
• 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

Seminar Content

• Introduction
• Overview of Business Analysis
• Project Management for Business Analysis
• 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 project

• Gathering and Structuring Requirements

  • Techniques used to gather and structure types of requirements

  1. Interviews
  2. Questionnaires
  3. Workgroup / JAD sessions
  4. Surveys and observations

  • Use cases as a method for gathering and documenting requirements

• Overview of Logical Data Modeling
• Reading a Logical Data Model
• Introduction to Building a Logical Data Model

  • Project Initiation

  • Entity Type Definition

  • Case study exercise

  • Relationship Type Definition

  • Entity-level diagrams

• Case study exercise
• Key Attribute Type Definition

  • Identifying key attributes

  • Defining key attributes

  • Redefining relationships

• Case study exercise
• Non-Key Attribute Type Definition

  • Identifying and defining non-key attributes

  • Producing a fully refined logical data model

  • Case study exercise

• Fundamentals of Logical Process Modeling

  • Objectives and modeling definitions

  • Process modeling techniques

• Building Context Diagrams

  • Identifying functions, external objects, and information views

  • Case study exercise for building context diagrams

• Building Process Decomposition Diagrams

  • Objectives and definitions

  • Rules of decomposition to the elementary process

  • Case study exercise for building process decomposition diagrams

• Building Process Flows and Data Flow Diagrams

  • 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 using the context and decomposition diagrams

  • Case study exercise building the action diagram for a process

• Additional Information Used in Business Analysis

  • Metadata and its role in information systems

  • Storage and access to metadata

  • Repositories and their strengths and limitations

• Facilitating for Business Requirements

  • JAD approaches for data and process requirements gathering techniques

  • Agendas, scripts, templates, and facilitation techniques for requirements meetings and focus groups

• Documenting 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

  1. Differences between requirements and specifications
  2. Techniques for transformation and use as foundation for application development
• Workshop Summary