1. What is Business Analysis

• Describe the business change lifecycle
• List the following principles of business analysis
• Describe the variants of the business analyst role

2. The Competencies of a Business Analyst

• Explain the concept of the T-shaped Professional
• Identify the three areas of business analysis competency

3. The Strategic Context for Business Analysis

• Describe business analysis and the strategic context
• Define the factors assessed using PESTLE to analyse an external environment
• Identify the elements of the VMOST technique used to analyse an internal environment
• Describe the following elements of performance measurement
• Describe the structure of a SWOT analysis
• Describe the POPIT and Business Model Canvas techniques used in strategy execution

4. The Business Analysis Service Framework, incorporating the following services:

• Situation investigation and problem analysis
• Feasibility assessment and business case development
• Business process improvement
• Requirement’s definition
• Business acceptance testing
• Business change deployment
• Stakeholder engagement

5. Investigating the Business Situation

• Understand the purpose of workshops
• Understand the purpose of observation
• Understand the purpose of interviews
• Understand the purpose of scenarios
• Understand the purpose of prototyping
• Define user role analysis
• Define quantitative approaches including: Surveys or questionnaires, Activity sampling, Document analysis
• Describe the Rich pictures Mind maps, two diagrammatic techniques used to record a business situation

6. Analysing and Managing Stakeholders

• Identify stakeholder categories using the stakeholder wheel
• Describe the Power/Interest grid technique to analyse stakeholders
• Describe stakeholder responsibilities using RASCI (RACI) technique

7. Improving Business Services and Processes

• Explain the business process hierarchy
• Describe aspects of the event response level (UML activity diagrams, or process swimlane diagrams)
• Describe aspect of the actor-task level (Tasks writing the UML activity diagram)
• Analysis considerations at actor-task level (Steps or ‘work instructions’ supporting each Task level)
• Understand the concepts of the as-is and to-be process models
• Identify generic approaches to improving business processes
• Define the purpose of customer journey maps

8. Defining the solution

• Describe the gap analysis process
• Explain the use of POPIT in gap analysis
• Describe the process for developing options
• Describe the purpose of design thinking

9. Making the Business Case

• Describe the lifecycle for a business case in business case development
• Identify the areas of feasibility assessment
• Define the structure and contents of a business case
• Understand categories of costs and benefits
• Understand the importance of an early impact assessment
• Understand a business risk assessment in relation to the options presented
• Explain the purpose of the following investment appraisal techniques; payback, discounted cash flow (net present value) and internal rate of return
• List the key features relevant to the production of a business case within an Agile contex

10. Establishing the Requirements

• Explain the requirements engineering framework
• Understand the role of different actors in requirements engineering
• Understand the categories of requirements, business, technical, functional and non-functional
• Describe the hierarchy of requirements
• Describe requirements elicitation techniques
• Understand requirements analysis, including; requirements filters, INVEST, MoSCoW and Business rules

11. Documenting and Modelling Requirements

• Understand requirements documentation styles including; text-based documentation styles and Diagrammatic documentation styles
• Define the structure of the business requirements document
• Understand the importance of the requirements catalogue
• Describe the format of user stories
• Describe the elements of the use case diagram used to model functional requirements
• Describe the elements of a class model used to model data
• Describe the product backlog in modelling and documentation in an Agile environment

12. Validating and Managing Requirements

• Formal requirements validation
• The activities in the Agile requirements validation process
• Describe traceability and change control in relation to requirements management

13. Delivering the Requirements

• Describe the following types of delivery lifecycle; waterfall lifecycle, the “V” model, the incremental lifecycle and the iterative lifecycle (Agile)

14. Delivering the Business Solution

• Explain the role of the business analyst in the business change lifecycle
• Describe the role of the business analyst during the design, development and test stages
• Describe the SARAH (a person focused organisational change management tool) and a business readiness assessment technique
• Describe how the benefits plan is used in the realisation stage