Becoming Agile Business Analyst - AAC IIBA Certification

Adopt an agile mindset by embracing inspect-and-adapt, constant stakeholder and team feedback, and deliver value rapidly and consistently while maintaining quality and reducing waste.

Identify seven agile principles for business analysts, including see the whole, think as a customer, determine value, get real using example, assess what is doable, collaborate, and avoid waste.

Avoid agile practices when processes are standardized, when testing could be catastrophic, or when processes cannot be broken down into smaller pieces.

Learn a quick trick to recall the Agile Manifesto: individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and change over plans.

Explore the business analysis core concept model, detailing six dimensions: needs, change, solution, stakeholders, value, and context—and connect them to agile principles for delivering real, value-driven change.

Master business analysis core concept model (BACCM) by exploring context and stakeholder value in a minute exercise, illustrating modernization and a CSV representation of these concepts.

Master pro tips on planning techniques in minutes, combining predictive analytics and adaptive planning, with emphasis on short-term blocks and aligning short-term actions with long-term goals.

Unpack the strategy horizon by aligning organizational goals, improving communication, and reducing complexity while assessing business goals, competitors, regulatory requirements, and customer preferences to select funded initiatives.

Explore how a solution comprises multiple options and components, illustrated by Google's Gmail, Hangouts, Google Docs, and Drive as distinct yet complementary options.

In the delivery horizon, teams translate initiative requirements into implementable stories. Prioritize, sequence, manage risks and dependencies, and maintain the backlog with the product owner, incorporating feedback.

Test your knowledge of the delivery horizon in agile analysis, exploring how teams prioritize backlog items, collaborate with the product owner, and deliver discrete, valuable software using iterative techniques.

Receive a pro tip on the three horizons in a minute, focusing on quick horizon-based analysis and how to initiate next steps from past insights.

Differentiate between output and outcome to align with user requirements and business requirements, document the business requirements and the user map of a product, and drive valuable outcomes.

Apply seven agile principles across strategy, initiative, and delivery horizons to prioritize backlog, determine valuable outcomes, think as a customer, and foster collaboration while reducing waste.

Explore agile technique categories for business analysts—communication, process analysis, product management, requirement management, and understanding customers—with techniques such as planning workshops, backlog refinement, user stories, spikes, estimation, personas, and storyboarding.

Develop communication techniques through backlog refinement, planning workshops with product owner and stakeholders, portfolio Kanban with visual displays and work in progress limits, and effective demo, review sessions, and retrospectives.

Backlog refinement clarifies backlog items through story elaboration, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and story decomposition, aligning prioritization and sequencing with sprint planning, product owner and business analyst collaboration.

Discover the difference between B and C in prioritization for agile business analysis. Learn to select priority items from a list, assign ownership, and sequence decisions within a program.

plan workshops bring stakeholders from multiple teams together to determine valuable work for the next six months, discuss requirements, risks, dependencies, and collaboration across strategy, initiative, and delivery horizons.

Explore portfolio kanban as a visual system that tracks work from to do to done, uses work in progress limits to prevent bottlenecks, and helps identify flow constraints across divisions.

Practice retrospectives in Scrum to identify what went well and what can improve within sprints, guided by a neutral facilitator and open feedback that builds trust.

Explore process analysis by examining two dimensions: internal team techniques like value stream mapping and external team approaches such as impact mapping.

Impact mapping aligns initiatives with organizational goals by linking goal, actors, impact, and deliverables in a visual four-element framework.

Explore the third categorization of product management for internal teams, including the minimal viable product, product roadmap, purpose alignment model, and real option, with strengths and limitations.

Define the problem, test a minimal feature set, and validate learning with customers using a minimal viable product. Learn how MVPs reduce costs, manage expectations, and guide feedback and iteration.

Create and maintain a product roadmap that visually represents features and initiatives across quarterly plans. Align stakeholders through planning workshops, backlog refinement, and iteration planning, while monitoring prioritization changes.

Apply the purpose alignment model to rate features by market differentiation and business focus, prioritizing high-differentiation and high-criticality items while noting its simplicity and potential limitations.

Evaluate real options to decide when to buy Oracle databases, recognizing options have value, expire, never commit early, and link these to user stories or acceptance criteria.

Explore eight requirement management techniques, including gherkins using natural language to describe behavior, job stories and user stories, plus epics, spikes, and story mapping with invest criteria and acceptance criteria.

Learn how behavior driven development uses a customer readable domain specific language written in gherkin format (given, when, then) to verify behavior, automate tests, and generate documentation with three amigos.

Identify job stories by capturing stakeholder motivation and outcomes. Contrast them with user stories that describe features and avoid mixing formats in an iteration.

Master creating and refining user stories using the three cs: cards, conversation, and confirmation, with invest criteria to plan, prioritize, and validate backlog work in sprints.

Learn relative estimation using benchmarks to forecast story, epic, and theme delivery, applying planning poker or sizing methods while considering knowledge, experience, complexity, size, and uncertainty.

Investigate unknown topics with spikes, including purely functional, technical, and exploratory types, turning research into time-boxed user stories for iterative development.

Break bigger stories into manageable forms via story decomposition for sprint delivery. Collaborate with product owner and business analyst to apply horizontal or vertical slicing, avoiding over-decomposition that increases documentation.

Elaborate the story by detailing its description, title, acceptance criteria, and subtasks in backlog refinement or planning, with defined done and attached documentation to keep scope clear.

Story mapping visualizes a set of stories on a two-axis grid, mapping flow horizontally and priority vertically, to clarify epics and data flow while avoiding detail overload.

Discover how to understand your customers through persona, storyboarding, and value modeling, including leading value modeling, for product owners and business analysts within and outside teams.

Explore personas as a technique to understand and visualize the actual user, including age group, demographics, sex, geography, and a day in the life view, to guide product envisioning.

Storyboarding visualizes user scenarios with video screen displays, sketches, and notes to add context for marketing and digital platforms, while enabling quick, low-cost, contextual storytelling.

Understand the customer by examining user profiles based on age, income, and demographics; use storyboarding and value modeling to explore value delivered to the end user across horizons in agile.