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
