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Mastering Business Analysis
63 students
Mastering Business Analysis
Drive Project Success Through Insights
Created byCornelius Fichtner, PMP, CSM
Last updated 9/2026
English
English
What you'll learn
- Exhibit a strong understanding of a business analyst's core roles and responsibilities
- Demonstrate competencies in stakeholder engagement, strategic planning, and requirements management.
- Explain eliciting, analyzing, documenting, and managing project requirements to ensure solution alignment with project goals and stakeholder needs.
- Describe how a project manager enhances effectiveness by leveraging business analysis skills to navigate project complexities and drive successful outcomes.
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Course content
6 sections • 11 lectures • 5h 42m total length
Requirements
- Basic understanding and experience in project management practices and principles.
Description
I once flew to Munich for what was supposed to be a two-day meeting with a client. Three people from their side sat with me in front of a mock-up of their new website: one from one department, one from another, and their external designer. I pointed at an area of the screen and asked a simple question. What happens when you click here?
The first person said process A starts. The second said no, process B starts. The designer said you can't click there at all.
That evening I called my wife and told her I would not be home until Friday.
If you manage projects, you have been in that meeting. Maybe not in Munich, but in the room where everyone agrees on the project until someone asks how it will actually work. What happens next is business analysis: getting the right people talking, finding out what they really need, and turning that into requirements the team can build from.
Many projects never have a business analyst to do that work. It still has to be done, and very often it lands on the project manager. This course teaches you how to do it well, and how to work effectively with a business analyst when you have one.
Conversations with an expert, not lectures
Mastering Business Analysis is a series of in-depth conversations between me, Cornelius Fichtner, PMP, and business analysis expert Laura Brandenburg, CBAP.
Laura started her business analysis career in 2003, went on to build and lead a team of business analysts, project managers and QA professionals as a director, and in 2008 founded Bridging the Gap, where she trains professionals in business analysis. She is also the author of How to Start a Business Analyst Career.
I have been a project manager since 1989, and since 2005 I have conducted more than 500 interviews for The Project Management Podcast. My role here is to ask the questions a project manager would ask, and to keep asking until the answer is something you can use on Monday morning.
When Laura explains the difference between verifying and validating requirements, the follow-up asks whether the same person should be doing both. When she walks through the different types of requirements, the follow-up asks whether it actually matters which category a requirement ends up in. When the conversation turns to agile, she explains which parts of business analysis never fit into a user story at all.
Along the way, Laura shares the projects that taught her these lessons:
A company with a data warehouse full of information that still couldn't answer the questions its managers needed answered. The project had been attempted without a business analyst: plenty of conversations, no decisions.
A remote team that openly resisted a project, until the project team flew out, spent two full days listening, and adjusted the scope around their concerns. The resistance ended up improving the outcome.
A project where an architect built the infrastructure while the business analysts gathered requirements, with no connection between the two, until someone had to work out how to make them fit.
What you will study
The lessons cover all six knowledge areas of the IIBA's BABOK Guide, each discussed from the perspective of someone who has to apply it on a real project.
Foundations. What business analysis really is, how analysis differs from analytics, and how internal and external business analyst roles differ.
Planning and stakeholder engagement. How to identify and prioritize stakeholders and manage their expectations, and why something as simple as a meeting agenda that explains why each person is in the room builds real engagement. How to plan the business analysis work itself, which deliverable to start with when time is short (the one that resolves the most uncertainty), and how to tell scope creep apart from genuine discovery.
Requirements, from start to finish. Why "What do you want?" is the worst way to open an elicitation session, and how to choose the right elicitation technique for the situation. The differences between business, stakeholder, solution and transition requirements. Laura's rule of thumb for splitting your effort: roughly 10 percent planning, 70 percent analysis, 20 percent documentation. Formal versus informal documentation, and the defects she sees most often: inconsistent terminology, passive voice that hides who is responsible for what, and inconsistencies across documents. Finally, managing and communicating requirements, including the tools and traceability involved.
Strategy, solution evaluation, and roadmapping. How to compare solution options using a feature matrix, what happens when traceability is missing, how strategy analysis moves from current state to future state, and how product roadmaps connect projects to strategy.
Life cycle models and competencies. How predictive and adaptive approaches change the business analyst's work, including Laura's discovery that she spent more time on documentation on an agile team, not less, and the competencies that make a business analyst effective.
The BA and PM partnership. A final expert interview on how the two roles divide and share the work, how business analysis fits into agile delivery, and what artificial intelligence is changing for business analysts. It includes one distinction every project manager should hear: some changes reflect genuinely new information, and others only mean the team never finished clarifying what it wanted. The first kind is agility. The second kind is rework.
Who this is for
This course is for project managers and PMI credential holders who have some project experience and want a deeper understanding of business analysis, whether they work alongside business analysts or regularly end up doing that work themselves. It applies equally to predictive, agile and hybrid environments, on small projects as well as large ones.
It is not a certification exam prep course for business analysts, and it does not teach specific requirements tools or software. It teaches the thinking behind the work.
Earn 5.75 PDUs
If you hold a PMI certification, completing this course earns you 5.75 PDUs toward your renewal: 4.75 Ways of Working, 0.5 Power Skills, and 0.5 Business Acumen, at one PDU per hour across nearly six hours of content. Udemy issues a certificate of completion when you finish.
By the end
You will understand what good business analysis looks like, why projects that skip it tend to pay for it later, and how to work with a business analyst, or do the work yourself when there isn't one.
And the next time three people give you three different answers about the same screen, you will recognize it for what it is. Not a delay, but the most valuable meeting on your project.
Who this course is for:
- Mastering Business Analysis is ideal for anyone seeking to build a strong foundation in BA principles. Whether you're new to the field, transitioning from another career, or a professional looking to solidify your BA skills, this course is designed for you.
- PMI certified project managers who want to earn earn 5.75 PDUs (4.75 Ways of working, 0.50 Power Skills, 0.50 Business Acumen) for their recertification.