Business Analysis Essentials

Identify the key project actors, including business analysts, project managers, stakeholders, development teams, and testers, and learn how their roles and interests shape requirements elicitation and project delivery.

Identify and manage stakeholders early using stakeholder analysis to map beneficiaries, policy makers, and secondary stakeholders. Employ techniques like brainstorming, group consultations, and requirements workshops to engage them.

Identify and prioritize the major stakeholders, understand their interests and communication preferences, and learn techniques to engage them and win them around to support your project.

Explore classifying stakeholders by primary, secondary, and key roles, using examples like house construction and forex app, and apply RACI and a power–interest grid to tailor engagement.

Clarify what business analysis entails, the business analyst's role, and essential skills; identify and classify stakeholders, understand their motivations, and map them with sticky notes for ongoing refinement.

Clarifies the software development life cycle and its six phases—requirement gathering, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance—each producing deliverables.

Explore the system development life cycle and the major SDLC models, including waterfall, V-model, iterative, spiral, big bang, and agile, and learn how to select the right model.

Explore the waterfall model, the oldest structured SDLC method, where well-documented requirements guide each phase with no overlap. Apply when requirements are clear and stable; plan for rigid scope.

The V model, a verification and validation extension of the waterfall, ties each development phase to a corresponding testing phase in a disciplined, sequential SDLC.

Explore how the iterative model overcomes Waterfall weaknesses with cyclic, incremental development and smaller deliverables, enabling early business value and easier testing.

The spiral model combines iterative builds with four recurring phases, enabling customer feedback and evolving requirements while managing risk and budget constraints, but it can become an endless, complex process.

Explore the Big Bang model, a high-risk, low-planning SDLC approach that prioritizes development with few resources, often used for small projects and academic or practice contexts.

The agile model breaks the product into cycles, delivering a working product quickly through small, incremental releases. It emphasizes collaboration among customers, developers, and testers.

Examine software development life cycles from requirement gathering to maintenance, and compare models such as waterfall, v-model, iterative, spiral, big bang, and agile.

Understand how waterfall, v model, iterative, spiral, and agile SDLCs shape business analysis from elicitation and documentation to ongoing stakeholder communication.

Shows how the business analyst's role evolves through each SDLC phase, from feasibility and requirements gathering to design, implementation, and testing, with agile context.

Explore how requirements evolve through the software development life cycle, moving from requirements definition and elicitation to validation, documentation, and management, with impact assessment and stakeholder conflict resolution.

The business analyst adapts artifacts and deliverables across project phases, guiding requirements through definition, validation, documentation, and management while monitoring their lifecycle.

Learn how requirements elicitation defines, validates, and discovers business needs through stakeholder dialogue, capturing function, scope, performance, and constraints while navigating unclear, conflicting, and changing requirements.

Learn to elicit requirements through active stakeholder engagement, clarifying real needs to ensure complete, clear, correct, and reusable outcomes, while preparing with schedules, documents, and time zones.

Engage stakeholders to elicit and capture needs, using prior documents and an elicitation plan. Create a requirements questionnaire guided by 5w questions and practical tools like whiteboards and sticky notes.

Explore requirements elicitation as the business analyst’s core activity, detailing preparation, resource planning, and techniques like the 5w questions to discover evolving system needs.

Explore elicitation techniques across gathering, analyzing, and decision making, including brainstorming, interviews, root cause analysis, and prototyping, with guidance on selecting and combining methods.

Brainstorming elicits numerous ideas when requirements are unclear, fosters a free, diverse, participatory environment where ideas are recorded, built on, and evaluated to select the best solutions.

Practice brainstorming to explore house configurations and forex chart displays, rating ideas and highlighting how charts use opening price, closing price, high, and low.

Explore brainwriting as an anonymous, parallel alternative to traditional brainstorming, enabling quiet participants to contribute ideas on a shared problem and develop diverse solutions.

Learn how to use interviews as a structured elicitation technique to verify facts, clarify ambiguity, engage end users, and identify requirements, with preparation, active listening, and documenting interview notes.

Develop questions to define house configuration and power needs, including solar and bioenergy. Practice eliciting forex app requirements by interviewing the VP on access, security, funds, charts, and indicators.

Observe and shadow the interviewee in a CSR environment, think aloud while mapping current processes, and collect data for requirements analysis and improvement opportunities.

Observe the coffee shop ordering process, documenting each step from order to change. Verify findings with the customer or cashier and think aloud to capture concerns.

Use focus groups to elicit subjective information about stakeholders’ attitudes, feelings, and beliefs toward the solution. Keep groups 6–12, use a moderator and recorder, and report themes.

Leverage requirements workshops to elicit and sign off requirements, using two business analysts as facilitator and recorder to gain consensus, reduce defects by 20–50% and cut scope creep by 10–80%.

Explore elicitation techniques for gathering requirements, including brainstorming, brainwriting, interviews, observation, focus groups, and requirements workshops, and learn how combining methods yields comprehensive business analysis.

Analyze documentation to identify root causes using a structured approach and develop a problem statement. Build a fishbone (Ishikawa) diagram and apply 5 whys by process, people, materials, and equipment.

Develop a fishbone diagram to identify potential root causes of construction delays at Paul and Laura’s house, exploring people, process, materials, and machinery, and brainstorm with peers.

Explore gap analysis to map from current state to a desired future state, identify met and unmet requirements, and determine the best path for projects, compliance, and IT initiatives.

Explore interface analysis as an elicitation technique to ensure interoperability by examining inputs, outputs, validation rules, and data transformations via context diagrams for interconnected systems.

Analyze existing documentation to kick-start requirements elicitation, understand the business and project background, identify improvement opportunities, and confirm insights through interviews or workshops.

Explore root cause analysis, GAP analysis, interface analysis, and document analysis to identify root causes, map from current to future states, and ensure seamless information exchange.

Apply T-charts to collect pros and cons, guiding stakeholders toward consensus and better decisions. Use a visual T-chart to decide on extending forex functionality in stages.

In this activity, students use a T-chart to decide between a bungalow and a two-storey house, weighing accessibility, safety, legislation, and preferences as a reflection of business analysts in practice.

Apply the impact/effort grid to rank ideas by benefit versus cost, using a step-by-step method to plot options and prioritize them for a forex metals and commodities application.

Use multivoting to prioritize ideas from brainstorming by agreeing on criteria, allocating one third of the ideas as votes, and tallying results to reach consensus on top items.

Learn how to use a criteria-based grid, or prioritization matrix, to evaluate options by selecting 3–5 criteria, weighting them, scoring choices, and reaching consensus.

Apply the criteria-based grid to decide which chart types—line, bar, or candlestick charts—meet criteria like easy comparison, attractiveness, and easy to understand for the Forex application, and reach consensus.

Use prototyping to identify stakeholder needs by building early prototypes that reveal look, feel, and workflow. Gather and document requirements through client validation and decide between throw-away or iterative development.

Learn to apply elicitation techniques for decision making, including t-charts, multivoting, impact/effort grid, criteria-based grid, and prototyping, and choose or combine them for your project needs.

Documenting and verifying requirements with stakeholders sets expectations and guides development and testing. A solid, multi-format requirements document prevents misunderstandings and costly rework.

The lecture explains declarative requirements and contrasts BRD with SRS from end-user and technical perspectives. It shows how 'the system must' statements guide documentation and demonstrates BRD and SRS templates.

Explain use cases and actors, map basic flows and happy path in a use case diagram within UML, and discuss alternative flows and supplementary specifications.

Learn data models, including entity relationship diagrams, data dictionaries, and data mappings, and how they shape databases with entities, attributes, and primary and foreign keys.

Explore business process models, including as is and to be diagrams, to map sequences of events and actions, analyze current processes, design value-added improvements, and optimize customer experience and efficiency.

Define and distinguish business rules from business requirements, showing how atomic rules constrain behavior and drive system changes, with examples from insurance and forex applications.

Master the requirements sign-off process by aligning stakeholders, mitigating accountability risks, and navigating regulatory and agile contexts through a practical, step-by-step email and sign-off workflow.

Master the scope change management process from documenting change requests to final assessment. Learn to plan, design and test changes, implement them, and keep the requirements documentation up-to-date.

See how requirements tools centralize a repository, improve traceability, and enable visual modeling and integration, while facing learning curves and complexity for large projects.

Sign off requirements to prevent ambiguity and set a governance bylaw for the project, and keep the documented requirements up to date as the application evolves.

Plan and execute requirements communication by identifying participants, validating changes with input providers, and securing sponsor approvals, while continuously updating the project team and stakeholders through walk-throughs.

Explore how geography, culture, and formality affect communicating requirements across dispersed teams, and use visual tools to clarify complex needs.

Learn to communicate requirements effectively to stakeholders and the project team, using a checklist to ensure all parties—business stakeholders, project managers, developers, peers, testers, and other systems—are informed.