Fundamentals of Business Analysis

Identify stakeholders and their upstream and downstream impacts, and explore types with unique needs. Learn to manage conflicts among stakeholder needs to guide requirements across projects.

Define the project manager as the project’s driver responsible for budget, deadline, scope, and quality, and show how business analysts support them by managing risks and keeping projects on track.

Translate requirements into working systems; developers may also manage databases, infrastructure, and architecture. Address time pressure, interruptions, and changing requirements by providing clear requirements and consolidating questions with analysts.

Discover the pivotal role of testers in software projects, from early involvement during requirements to close collaboration with developers, ensuring high product quality and addressing defects.

Learn how management stakeholders, including managers and sponsors, influence requirements and ensure project success through timely, high-quality business analysis and effective communication.

Explore the front line stakeholders, including customers (consumers and institutions) and internal users, and learn how their needs drive requirements, design, and validation to prevent product failure.

resolve external, internal, and mixed stakeholder conflicts using stakeholder needs analysis, uncovering needs, priorities, and valid assumptions, then brainstorm mutual-gain solutions.

Explore types of life cycles in business analysis, from biological analogies to defect and process lifecycles, and learn how diagrams model beginnings and endings in the systems development life cycle.

Explore how PLC and SDLC integrate, with the project life cycle’s initiation, planning, execution and control, aligning to SDLC’s analysis, design, development, testing, and implementation, including waterfall, iterative, and agile.

Explore waterfall and iterative SDLCs, compare their phases and testing approaches, and learn how V-model mapping highlights testing at each development stage and the benefits and challenges of iteration.

Explore agile fundamentals and scrum in practice, learning how sprints, planning, daily standups, reviews, and retrospectives drive faster, customer-aligned product development with roles like product owner and scrum master.

Explore the product life cycle, its four phases—ideation, development, maturing, and replacement—and how business analysts drive ideation and development with ongoing market analysis across projects and sdlc.

Explore the requirements life cycle, from drafting and validating through baselining, implementing, managing, and retiring, and learn how these phases guide business analysis across projects.

Discover NorwalkAberdeen's three-phase requirements definition model—form, transform, finalize—covering elicitation, brainstorming, and research to draft, transform, and finalize a verified, prioritized requirements document.

Learn the form phase of Norwalk Aberdeen's RDM model to gather and define usable requirements, capturing source and rationale to clarify stakeholder needs and guide prioritization for requirement implementation.

Identify and apply six key requirement attributes: clear, complete, applicable, prioritized, implementable, and testable, to prevent miscommunication and guide peer reviews and walkthroughs.

Explore four requirement types—business, user, functional, and non-functional—and learn how to create atomic, ROI-driven requirements that align with strategy and stakeholder needs.

Identify and gather user requirements from internal users and customers, distinguish them from business requirements, and trace each requirement to its rationale, source, and parent for clear scope.

Functional requirements specify how the system fulfills business and user needs, exemplified by FR1: listing beverages in title case, in ascending order, with unit cost to two decimals.

Identify and understand non-functional (quality) requirements, including data privacy, security, performance, and usability, and learn how to categorize and implement them for compliant, reliable systems.

Identify requirement sources, including stakeholders and documentary sources like existing documents and standards. Ensure reliability, consult experts, and document sources with named individuals to guide effective requirement gathering.

Explore the art and science of gathering requirements through one-on-one stakeholder interviews, emphasizing preparation, open-ended questions, confirming understanding, and follow-up notes.

Master gathering requirements via group interviews by encouraging open discussion and structured notes, with tips to facilitate, plan an agenda, and capture who spoke and why.

Compare common requirements documents and templates, including Wiegers' vision and scope and the SRS, BRD and FRD sets, while noting benefits and limitations and the value of consolidation.

Collaborate to define agile requirements through user stories and acceptance criteria, manage product and sprint backlogs, and decompose epics into actionable tasks.

Explore the business analysts toolbox, focusing on analysis and modeling to transform stakeholder requirements into effective solutions by examining needs both individually and holistically.

Think through requirements by performing unstructured analysis, identify inconsistencies and gaps, ask clarifying questions, and group related requirements to improve a sports beverage tracking system.

Break down a complex business requirement into smaller, manageable parts, guiding requirements elicitation and the transformation into functional and non-functional specifications, including agile epics and user stories.

Explore additive and subtractive analysis as decomposition-like methods that add or remove components to reveal a solution's value and prioritize user requirements by understanding rationale, leading to gap analysis.

Define and analyze gaps between current and future states, compare requirements with vendor products, and craft actionable roadmaps to enable change in business analysis practice.

Learn decision analysis through practical tools like decision trees, decision tables, and weighted decision tables to evaluate options and choose cost-effective CRM solutions.

Learn to identify root causes of problems with root cause analysis using the five whys and Ishikawa diagrams, including how to map causes, validate logic, and focus on process improvements.

Perform a stakeholder needs analysis by asking four questions: what they want, why, priority, and assumptions, and reconcile conflicting requirements using a template for product, legal, and regulators.

Explore how modeling illustrates concepts, simplifies topics for stakeholders, and predicts outcomes in process design. Use illustrative models like mockups to validate and discover requirements; flowcharts begin the exploration.

Learn how flowcharts diagram sequences of actions and decisions using rectangles, diamonds, and start–finish shapes. Build examples like logon processes, label connectors, and explore the swim lane flow chart.

Learn to use swimlane flowcharts, organizing steps by actor lanes to show who does what and when, highlighting handoffs and bottlenecks with real-world examples.

Explore entity-relationship modeling with diagrams that map entities, relationships, and attributes, using cardinality to show how many instances participate.

Explore state transition diagrams to model object states and transitions, including start and finish states, in a light switch example and a workflow for orders.

Explore data flow modeling with Yourdon DeMarco notation, illustrating how data moves through processes, data stores, and inputs/outputs, driven by labeled arrows and simple rules.

Learn to model user–system interactions with use cases and diagrams, covering components, flows, preconditions, postconditions, and basic versus alternate paths.

Explore how everyday actions form business processes like bank account opening and deposits. Model them with actors, activities, tools, and information, using swimlane flowcharts to design and improve processes.

Explore unified modeling language and business process modeling notations for analysis, covering class diagrams, sequence diagrams, state transition diagrams, and use case diagrams for object-oriented and process modeling.

Finalize a solid requirements document by socializing with stakeholders to gain acceptance, presenting complete, implementable, and testable requirements, and baselined them through change control for project handoff.

Socialize requirements to align stakeholders, address concerns before the walkthrough, and build acceptance for the proposed solution. Use a three-question approach to identify stakeholders and navigate politics.

Master the requirements walkthrough to align stakeholders, finalize business, user, functional, and non-functional requirements, and secure approvals through clear graphics like flowcharts and use case diagrams.

Baseline the requirements and apply a formal change control process to review and approve changes via change requests and a change control board.

Explore forming, transforming, and finalizing requirements in a real-world scenario. Follow Doug, Solomon, and Martha as they interview stakeholders and apply the requirements development model at X, y, z.

Identify bottlenecks in the beverage sales reporting process, interview stakeholders to map the current workflow, and establish high-level requirements for timely and efficient automated reporting.

Explore how a product analyst gathers requirements through a detailed interview with Martha. Diagnose monthly report bottlenecks, data quality issues, and the demand for ad hoc custom reports.

Turn scenario notes into draft requirements using a template, producing atomic business, user, and functional requirements while capturing unknowns and assumptions for clear documentation.

Apply analysis and modeling techniques to gathered requirements, note that 20–30% of analysis occurs during gathering, perform stakeholder needs analysis, decompose inputs, and document current process with a swimlane flowchart.

Analyze stakeholder needs analysis by examining Solomon and Martha’s priorities and applying four questions about what they want, why they want it, and priority of needs, automation of information delivery.

Learn decomposition analysis by breaking the product sales report into title, top table, and bottom table, iterating to finer pieces, and mapping the report collation with a swimlane flow chart.

Explore a BPM diagram presented as a swimlane flowchart, featuring start and end shapes. Track subprocesses, data objects, and grouping boxes while noting use of Bizagi Process Modeler.

This walkthrough finalizes the requirements by presenting the document to stakeholders and highlighting missing items. It reviews business and user needs, data fields, and on-demand reports to support approval.