Business Analysis - Beginner to Master (10 PDUs)

Define a business analyst's role: elicit requirements from customers and stakeholders, ensure the solution aligns with needs, and delivers the intended impact using analysis tools and processes.

Explore the pet buddy project, a mobile app that matches pet sitters with owners for long stays, the Uber of pet care, while analysts elicit requirements and shape scope.

Explore project delivery approaches by contrasting waterfall and agile, and learn when to apply sequential, definable-work processes versus incremental, exploratory delivery in high uncertainty environments.

Explore how waterfall and agile manage the triple constraint of scope, time, and cost. Agile fixes time and cost while keeping scope flexible through iterative, incremental delivery.

Master the waterfall approach as a sequential project lifecycle from initiating through closing. Define scope, create the charter, gather requirements, and manage quality, cost, resources, and procurements.

Explore agile roles: product owner, scrum master, and team delivering value. Prioritize backlog, plan roadmaps, facilitate ceremonies, and include analysts gathering requirements.

Learn to manage a product backlog and break features into user story cards with acceptance criteria. Use daily standups, Kanban boards, and backlog refinement to plan sprints and improve.

Identify how environmental factors and organizational process assets shape business analysis across agile or waterfall environments, including external market conditions, stakeholder risk appetites, standards, templates, and knowledge repositories.

Initiate a project to deliver business value by shaping a business case, benefits management plan, and stakeholder elicitation through gap analysis and smart goals.

Learn to craft a project business case that assesses feasibility, costs, benefits, and risks, collects business needs and stakeholders input, analyzes gaps, and makes a recommended option, with canvas alternatives.

Apply the jobs to be done framework by Clayton Christensen to reveal the real customer problem, as shown by McDonald's breakfast needs and the pet buddy service.

Learn benchmarking and gap analysis to compare processes with other organizations, map current capabilities, identify root causes, and plan features to close gaps in pet-sitting apps or services.

Define smart goals to increase customers through mobile app, using specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound targets, and document a benefits management plan with owners, metrics, timeframe, assumptions, and risks.

Analyze make or buy options for in-house versus vendor solutions, including white labeling and commercial off-the-shelf programs, by comparing initial and ongoing costs.

Define source selection criteria and craft bid documents for vendors, including RFI, RFP, and RFQ; outline fixed price, fixed price with incentives, or economic price adjustments, plus knowledge transfer.

Identify and manage project risk early using a risk register, probability and impact scoring, and controls, with swot and pestel analyses and risk categories.

Learn how to analyze risk using qualitative and quantitative methods, define risk levels, and apply risk responses with tools like a risk matrix, RAID chart, and Monte Carlo simulations.

Create and approve the business analysis plan that defines ways of working, requirements management, prioritization, metrics, traceability, and supports the benefits management plan and business case with stakeholder input.

learn to measure project success using the balanced scorecard and product and customer measures, including financial metrics, customer metrics, internal measures, and learning and growth, to guide business analysis.

Apply lean customer driven metrics from the Toyota Production System to measure quality, delivery speed, cost, and risk, reduce defects, and protect brand while enhancing customer value.

Explore financial measures such as net present value, internal rate of return, return on investment, payback period, and benefit to cost ratio to evaluate project value.

Explore customer measures, including acquisition cost, lifetime value, and churn, and learn to improve satisfaction through ratings, feedback, and the net promoter score framework.

Learn how to set objectives and key results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure product success, using examples like signups, churn, and revenue targets.

Identify and engage the right stakeholders to elicit requirements, map roles with the organizational breakdown structure, and define the definition of ready and the definition of done for success.

Classify stakeholders by influence and impact using tools like the 3D salience model and RACI, map current and desired states, and plan tailored engagement.

Develop a team charter outlining ways of working, roles, values, and stakeholder expectations, then define ready and done criteria with prototypes and senior user sign-offs.

Hold regular retrospectives after two weeks or sprints to celebrate what went well, identify challenges, and assign actions to improve ways of working, often called post-mortems or after action reviews.

Identify and elicit stakeholder needs to define the project scope, collecting business, stakeholder, transition, and functional and non-functional requirements using models, prototypes, and affinity diagrams.

Apply the double diamond approach and the three Cs of user stories, with the three amigos, to diverge and converge on problems, then confirm the definition of ready and done.

Create a permissions matrix to elicit user requirements and assign CRUD access by role for the pet buddy app, using a mind map to plan location-based matching and dog-sitter scheduling.

Trace requirements with a requirements traceability matrix, linking creators, requesters, scope, test cases, and quality assurance, while using rolling wave planning and clear in/out of scope.

Align customer requirements with project scope by using a requirements traceability matrix, defining acceptance criteria, and applying change control, while monitoring for scope creep and gold plating.

Decompose high level customer requirements into deliverables, epics, and user stories for iterations, using agile and waterfall concepts, story mapping, work breakdown and product breakdown structures, and vertical slices.

Discover five ways to write acceptance criteria for work packages and user stories—steps with expected results, use cases, feature driven development, normal user story templates, and behavior driven development.

Apply the invest framework to break deliverables into independent, usable, negotiable, valuable, and vertically sliced user stories that are estimable and testable against acceptance criteria within an iteration.

Learn to gather estimates from the people doing the work and refine ranges for duration, cost, and effort from preliminary to definitive as details unfold.

Discover estimation techniques for project duration, cost, and effort, including analogous, parametric, three-point, beta/pert, and bottom-up methods; learn to aggregate lower-level items into total project estimates.

Master agile estimation techniques like planning poker and Wideband Delphi to reach consensus through anonymized estimates and discussion of high and low values, using story points and Fibonacci sizing.

Explore change control techniques for waterfall and agile projects. Learn to manage change requests, baselined scope, and their cost and schedule impacts, while the product backlog guides prioritization.

Verify and validate deliverables by testing against customer requirements, confirming with business users and developers, and obtaining sponsor acceptance, ensuring alignment with the scope and the updated business analysis plan.

Learn to reveal hidden information through diagrams and models, map current and future states, and define the customer journey to elicit requirements and shape the product scope.

Explore value stream mapping to distinguish value-added from non-value-added steps, identify waste, and define value from the customer's perspective using Sipoc and Kanban.

Use a customer journey map and personas to capture customer needs and guide feature development from onboarding to booking, payment, stay, and review for Pet Buddy.

Prototype a project scope using low and high fidelity methods—from sketches and wireframes to 3d models—and document requirements with diagrams and system interface tables.

Explore how a sequence diagram maps customer input through system objects to payments and notifications in the Pet Buddy app, with context diagrams and a data dictionary detailing variables.

Prioritize the product backlog using methods like MoSCoW, cost-benefit, cost of delay, and Kano, while avoiding the sunk cost fallacy and abandoning low-value items.

Apply lean startup insights to build a minimum viable product that delivers value with the fewest features, gathers customer feedback, and prioritizes time, cost, scope, and quality.

Explore MoSCoW prioritization with must, should, could, and won’t, and analyze cost-benefit or value-effort to rank features and reveal an innovation sweet spot.

Explore multi voting as a democratic mechanism to prioritize features with stakeholders. Learn forms like monopoly money, dot voting, and 100-point voting, plus outcomes: unanimity, majority, or plurality.

Prioritize features using the cost of delay (CD3) by dividing expected profit by delivery duration, then rank items to maximize value. Compare with weighted shortest job first (SDF).

Explore Kano analysis and the product life cycle to categorize features as basic, satisfiers, or delights, then apply a multi-criteria decision chart to prioritize by cost, benefit, and stakeholder needs.

Explore scheduling techniques for business analysts, including rolling wave planning and analogous estimating, to align priorities. Use Gantt charts to identify the critical path and slack.

Apply leads and lags to adjust tasks and optimize schedules using Gantt charts and critical path method, with examples like lead time in photo editing and lag time after foundation.

Explain the precedence diagramming method (PDM) for linking activities in a schedule using finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, and start-to-finish relationships in Microsoft Project.

Learn to compress schedules by fast tracking and crashing—performing tasks in parallel or adding resources—without reducing scope, to meet schedule constraints and imposed dates, while mindful of diminishing returns.

Explore the cost of quality, from prevention, appraisal, and internal and external failure costs, and how analysts and quality assurance teams reduce waste to deliver quality from requirements to customers.

Explore the V-model and test pyramid, highlighting unit, integration, system, and user acceptance tests across the software life cycle from requirements to user acceptance testing.

Learn test driven development and behavior driven development with red green refactor and given when then for automated tests, and explore penetration testing by ethical hackers to identify vulnerabilities.

Develop a quality management plan that defines the approach, objectives, acceptance criteria, and testing activities to ensure 100% test cases pass with zero severity 1 defects.

Explore continuous integration and version control, merging and testing code daily in a main branch workflow, using Git or GitHub, testing changes before release, and safely reverting to prior versions.

Identify and remove the eight wastes from downtime in your process, including defects, rework, overproduction, waiting, non-value-adding use of talent, transport, inventory, motion, and excessive processing.

Analyze defects using a control chart with center, upper and lower limits to detect out-of-control signals, then prioritize fixes with a Pareto diagram of top defect types.

Explore Ishikawa fishbone diagrams and the five whys to identify root causes of issues like sitter availability mismatches and booking glitches, then collaborate to implement row-level locking and concurrency controls.

Present tested deliverables for sponsor acceptance, review risk profiles and risk owners, secure approvals before release; then demonstrate a usable increment in agile sprints.