BCS Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis

Course Outline

• The Business Change Life Cycle

  The role of the Business Analyst in the business change life cycle

  • Producing the business case
  • Other roles in the business change life cycle

  The framework for business analysis activities

  • Relating business analysis to strategic analysis, definition, and IT systems analysis
  • The holistic approach to business analysis

• Understanding the Strategic Context

  Analyzing the business environment

  • Internal and external environments
  • Analyzing the business with SWOT analysis

  Developing business metrics

  • Identifying your Critical Success Factors (CSF)
  • Creating Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
  • Identifying critical success with the Balanced Business Scorecard

• Project Discipline for Business Analysis Studies

  • Reading the Terms of Reference or Project Initiation Document
  • OSCAR (objectives, scope, constraints, authority and resources)
  • What does the business wish to achieve and deliver?
  • Creating SMART objectives

• Understanding the Business Situation

  Stakeholder identification

  • Using the Stakeholder wheel
  • Overview of investigative techniques

  Representing a holistic view of the business situation

  • Generating Rich pictures
  • Making Mind Maps

• Analyzing Stakeholder Perspectives

  Stakeholder analysis and management

  • Power/Interest Grid
  • Stakeholder management strategies

  Identifying and defining different perspectives

  • Contrasting different stakeholder perspectives
  • Analyzing the root cause with CATWOE

• Analyzing and Modeling Business Activities

  Developing a Business Activity Model

  • Depicting business perspectives with a Business Activity Model (BAM)
  • Describing the BAM process and notation
  • Identifying business events

  Analyzing business rules

  • Distinguishing between business rule types
  • Recognizing business rules levels of constraint

  Building the consensus Business Activity Model

  • Identifying differences between business activity models
  • Negotiating to resolve conflicts

• Identifying Potential Solutions

  Gap analysis - comparing the ideal and existing systems

  • Outlining the gap analysis process
  • Identifying inputs to, and outputs from, gap analysis

  Defining a new business model

  • Exploiting areas for change - processes, people, technology and organization

  Identifying requirements using business activity and business process models

  • Classifying models that document and analyze requirements
  • Recognizing data/processing requirements

• Making the Business Case

  The Business Case life cycle

  • Structuring the business case
  • Identifying and shortlisting options for business change

  Identifying and categorizing costs and benefits

  • Classifying tangible and intangible costs and benefits
  • Investment appraisal techniques

  Risk and impact identification, categorization, and management

  • Identifying and assessing risk impact and probability
  • Risk management approaches