Plan the Project as a Business Analyst - IIBA Endorsed

Print the attached student workbook, fill it as you work through the course, and use it to learn, retain information, and reference for exams, interviews, or on the job.

Learn how the business analyst and project manager collaborate to plan the project, bridge gaps, and ensure the solution meets business needs, including hybrid roles.

Define a project as a temporary, unique endeavor with a start and end, identify stakeholders affected by the change, and clarify requirements to meet the business need.

Queensland Health's case study shows how miscommunication and end-of-support forced rapid change, ballooning a 6.2 million budget to 1.24 billion and seven months to 31 months, causing payroll chaos.

Initiate the project by identifying stakeholders, drafting the project charter, and conducting a kickoff meeting to align the project team and inform the organization about the initiative.

Identify internal and external stakeholders early in planning, including the project team, sponsor, users, and management. Consider suppliers, competitors, customers, regulators, and citizens affected by the change.

Identify all stakeholders to increase project success by eliciting requirements and capturing business needs, and by considering diverse perspectives to ease change resistance.

Identify all stakeholders and maintain a stakeholder register with details like name, position, internal or external, project role, and contact information, using the downloadable template to keep everyone informed.

Keep the stakeholder register up to date to reflect new stakeholders and shifting roles, ensuring accurate contact details and clear understanding of project responsibilities as the project evolves.

Create a project charter to formally define the project, inform the organization and affected users, set boundaries and start date, and engage the project team and stakeholders.

Schedule a one-hour kickoff meeting with the core project team, share a clear agenda, review the project charter in advance, and align on objectives to motivate the team.

Create a requirements management plan that organizes business analysis information and defines abstraction level, storage and access, attributes, reuse, traceability, change control, and approvals.

Detail-oriented requirement abstraction guides Centron projects, ensuring thorough requirements for handover to developers and client review, reducing assumptions and aligning with University of Wisconsin expectations.

Plan the project by deciding where to store requirements and who can access them, choosing digital or physical formats and tools like Trello or JIRA.

Centron uses Trello to track requirements through idea, defined, approved, in development, and testing stages, updating the BRD as needed in a cloud-based, collaborative workflow.

Plan requirement attributes as metadata to aid stakeholder identification, estimation, and change impact, including unique IDs, user stories, acceptance criteria, and status.

Identify each requirement with a unique Trello-generated ID and document description, rationale, author, source, complexity, priority, and status in the business requirements document, and ensure status is defined or approved.

Plan to reuse requirements—such as standards, regulatory needs, business rules, and processes—to save time and ensure consistency across projects, using copy-paste, copy-link, or link methods.

Centron prioritizes delivery speed and deadlines over early requirement reuse, finishing the project to meet initial customer needs and later reviewing and adding reusable requirements to the repository.

Requirement traceability tracks a requirement from elicitation to deployment and support, clarifying changes and tests. Automate this with software, linking requirements to test cases via cross-reference or a traceability matrix.

Identify the change, assess its reasoning and impact, log it in the product backlog, then present it to the sponsor for approval, decline, or defer, and inform the team.

Execute change control with the requirements change request template, capturing project name, requester, date, and description; assess impact on schedule, budget, and resources, then obtain sponsor approval or deferral.

Define when and how stakeholders approve requirements to ensure they are detailed and aligned with business value; approvals occur during grooming and sprint planning, while predictive approvals use staged meetings.

Centron lacks standards for requirements approvals, letting project teams decide; uw frequency project uses sectional approvals with baseline and formal sign-off after eliciting and documenting full business requirements with stakeholders.

Define the project plan details by breaking down the project into components, setting a schedule, defining a quality plan, planning releases, and updating risks using predictive and adaptive methods.

Break down a project by structuring it into phases or components, then detail activities and sub-components, using charts, mind maps, or outlines to plan and communicate the work.

Begin with solo analysis, decide to break the project into phases or components, choose a model (org chart, mind map, or outline), then hold a workshop to refine the plan.

Explore adaptive project planning with user stories and story maps, and learn how the product backlog and user perspectives—students, instructors, employees, architects—shape goals and priorities.

Build an initial story map from left to right, outlining epics, features, and user stories for website access, create account, access account, and login flows.

Apply a work breakdown structure to organize a predictive project into deliverable components, including website security UI, account creation, login, forgotten password, and change password processes.

Define the project schedule by building a milestone list and estimating activity duration using the smart framework—specific, measurable, assignable, reasonable, and time-bounded—to monitor progress in predictive projects.

Estimate activity duration by considering resources, skills, complexity, and risk, updating estimates as information changes. Compare adaptive and predictive approaches, using relative buckets and absolute days.

Explore adaptive estimation techniques, including the Fibonacci sequence and story points, to size user stories and plan sprints by team velocity, breaking large items into smaller ones.

Learn adaptive estimation with t-shirt sizes (extra small, small, medium, large, extra large) and the Fibonacci sequence to size user stories for sprint planning.

Download and use the PERT estimation worksheet to enter activities and optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic estimates; it automatically computes the PERT estimate.

Explain ROM, the rough order of magnitude high-level estimate, and SWAG, a scientific wild-guess, noting a roughly 50% variance, ROI considerations, and its limited use in predictive projects.

Estimate project activities using a PERT worksheet, applying optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic estimates across requirements, design, development, and testing to validate the work breakdown structure.

Define estimation techniques for predictive projects during the workshop, including pert, assign duration estimates to each activity, and identify dependencies—mandatory, discretionary, and external—to shape the project schedule.

Learn why creating a project schedule is essential to establish start and end dates, milestones, and stakeholder alignment, and explore adaptive versus predictive approaches using sprints and activity durations.

Explore predictive scheduling from activity durations to build a Gantt chart that visualizes deliverables and dependencies, with parallel work, stakeholder analysis, and performance measures.

Plan the project by converting PERT estimates into a detailed schedule, outlining planning, requirements design, development, testing, training, and implementation with buffers for holidays and limited resources.

Reflect on the UW results frequency project schedule and learn to balance deadlines with realism by adjusting scope and resources, removing four items and adding resources to shorten the timeline.

Define a quality plan that outlines testing and quality assurance roles, defect management guidelines, and training requirements to ensure a bug-free, well-trained solution.

Download the quality plan template from this lecture, and use it to define testing and quality assurance, defect management, and training requirements for your project.

Embrace adaptive release planning to determine release frequency and what to include next, using a story map to earmark epics and features in each iteration.

Update your risk list and assessment document to capture newly identified risks from your project plan, ensuring the template reflects accurate, up-to-date risk management.

Learn to conduct a stakeholder power interest analysis by assessing interest, power, and engagement, and plot stakeholders into a four quadrant matrix to tailor engagement strategies.

Utilize the stakeholder power-interest analysis template to rate power, interest, and engagement, automatically plot stakeholders on the matrix, and download it for use in projects.

Learn how the RACI matrix aligns stakeholder responsibilities with project tasks, clarifying who is responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed to prevent confusion and ownership gaps.

Download and apply the RACI matrix template to your projects, and use it to assign responsibility for your various tasks, using course resources.

Define a collaboration and communication plan to guide stakeholder communication, align expectations, and gain feedback through a kickoff meeting, project status reports, and meeting notes.

Identify key metrics, set smart goals, and analyze results to measure a business analyst's impact; focus on accuracy, effectiveness, timeliness, and organizational support while avoiding cross-project comparisons.