PMI PBA Exam Preparation Course: 35 Contact Hours for PMI

Explore the PMI guide to business analysis as the must-read reference for the PMI PBA exam, detailing competencies, processes, and collaboration across lifecycles.

Discover how mature business analysis practices drive organizational agility, project success, and financial performance by focusing on people, processes, and culture, and by addressing root causes through needs assessments.

Gain an overview of seven essential terms in the PMI PBA exam, including business analysis, the business analyst, the product, and four product requirement types: business, stakeholder, solution, transition.

Clarifies the difference between product lifecycle and project lifecycle, explains how projects evolve products and how business analysis supports project delivery, with phases from concept to retirement.

Explore how business analysis aligns portfolio, program, and project management with organizational strategy, defining needs in the pre-project phase and shaping value through portfolio and program alignment.

Define business value as the net quantifiable benefit from a business endeavor, including tangible and intangible benefits, and show how portfolio, program, and project management optimize and measure it.

Explore the six knowledge areas and six process groups guiding 35 business analysis processes, from needs assessment to solution evaluation, including elicitation, requirements analysis, and traceability.

Learn to tailor business analysis processes, tools, techniques, and deliverables to each project’s lifecycle and context, balancing stakeholder needs, risk, regulation, and team maturity.

Explore enterprise environmental factors and organizational process assets as internal and external influences that guide business analysis, serving as inputs to all processes and shaping product focus.

Explore external enterprise environmental factors and their five categories: marketplace conditions, organizational politics and ethics, social and cultural considerations, legal and contractual restrictions, and external professional standards.

Explore the 11 internal enterprise environmental factors, from organizational culture and governance to security policies and stakeholder expectations and risk appetite, and learn how these factors shape business analysis.

Identify organizational process assets as the second major influence on business analysis, including templates, tools, methodologies, standards, and knowledge bases used by the organization as implicit inputs to BA processes.

Explore how organizational process assets, including processes, policies, procedures, templates, and centers of excellence, guide business analysis activities and change management across project and product lifecycles.

Explore knowledge bases that codify explicit knowledge and capture tacit know-how, highlighting five repositories - business knowledge, configuration management, lessons learned, issue and defect data, and Matrix.

Leverage the team and subject matter experts' knowledge as a rich source of information, insights, and future-state expectations for business analysis through conversations and user stories.

Organizational systems shape how business analysis is practiced by guiding product life cycles (adaptive or predictive), governance, and collaboration across functions, enabling high-quality deliverables and learning.

Explains the role and sphere of influence of the business analyst, clarifies common misunderstandings, and outlines competencies, organizational placement, and how business analysis supports project and program success.

Identify the business analyst’s sphere of influence, clarifying roles with the project manager and focusing on stakeholder engagement to elicit, analyze, and evolve product requirements.

Explore six key competencies for business analysts at the senior level, including analytical skills, expert judgment, business acumen, communication skills, personal and leadership skills, and tool knowledge.

Identify the problem or opportunity and assess the current state. Determine the future state, gaps, and viable options with recommendations, then develop the roadmap, business case, and charter.

Identify the problem or opportunity by eliciting data, analyzing enterprise environmental factors, and applying benchmarking, interviews, and prototyping to craft a clear business need and situation statement.

Conduct a current state assessment as part of the needs assessment and defining and aligning processes, using inputs such as enterprise and business architectures, goals, objectives, and the situation statement.

Determine the future state by identifying gaps between the current state and desired capabilities, using tools like gap analysis, affinity diagrams, and benchmarking to define required capabilities and business goals.

Identify viable options using benchmarking, cost-benefit analysis, and elicitation techniques to address business goals and future state; deliver feasibility study results and a recommended solution option.

Facilitate product roadmap development by outlining a high-level, strategic plan that aligns business goals with organizational strategy using workshops, product visioning, future model, and story mapping.

Assemble a comprehensive business case by synthesizing needs assessment insights, feasibility results, and the product roadmap to guide decision makers in go/no-go decisions on portfolio components.

Collaborate with sponsors and stakeholders to develop the charter from the business case and product scope, defining high-level scope, objectives, risks, and budget, and producing shared product information.

Learn how prototyping yields early feedback on requirements and how identifying the business need informs the business case, product roadmap, and future state decisions.

Explore the seven stakeholder engagement processes in business analysis, from identifying stakeholders and analyzing them to planning engagement, readiness for transition, and ongoing performance assessment.

Identify stakeholders by pinpointing individuals, groups, or organizations affected by the solution, using elicitation results, enterprise and business architectures, and the situation statement to populate the stakeholders register.

Conduct stakeholder analysis to systematically examine quantitative and qualitative information about stakeholders identified earlier. Update the stakeholder register to guide engagement, communication, and elicitation approaches throughout planning.

Develop a stakeholder engagement and communication approach using elicitation techniques, persona analysis, and the RASI model to engage and inform stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle.

Plan and align business analysis activities to create a clear business analysis plan, integrating charter, enterprise environmental factors, and planning approaches from other knowledge areas to support stakeholder engagement.

Prepare for transition to the future state by assessing organizational readiness and building a transition plan using the readiness assessment, current state analysis, product risks, and stakeholder engagement.

Monitor stakeholder engagement and communication to keep stakeholders informed and involved, and improve the engagement approach through an updated stakeholder register and elicitation techniques.

Assess business analysis performance to drive continuous improvement across projects. Leverage inputs like the business analysis plan, organizational standards, and metrics, plus burn down charts and retrospectives.

Explore planning techniques for business analysis, including story mapping, the product roadmap, rolling wave planning, and wideband delfi, plus bottom-up estimation, transition readiness, burn-down charts, and stakeholder mapping tools.

Plan, prepare, conduct, and confirm elicitation to draw out stakeholders' needs and requirements across multiple levels of product information. Explore how iterative, concurrent elicitation supports analysis and shared understanding.

Plan the elicitation approach by identifying stakeholders, selecting techniques, and sequencing activities to produce the elicitation approach output for guiding business analysis across adaptive or predictive lifecycles.

Prepare for elicitation by organizing sessions, scheduling stakeholders, and assembling elicitation preparation materials using document analysis and interviews to ensure efficient, value-driven elicitation.

Conduct elicitation uses techniques such as brainstorming, collaborative games, document analysis, interviews, observation, prototyping, and surveys to gather stakeholder input and produce unconfirmed elicitation results.

Confirm elicitation results to validate stakeholders' understanding and the accuracy of elicited information; use document analysis, glossary, interviews, observations, and walkthroughs to produce confirmed results for downstream processes.

Review key elicitation knowledge areas, outputs, and techniques covered by the quiz, such as prepare for elicitation materials, conduct and confirm elicitation results, and speed boat and storyboarding.

Introduces the analysis knowledge area for product requirements, detailing nine processes from determining the analysis approach to assessing design options and prioritizing requirements.

Determine analysis approach guides planning how analysis will occur, what to analyze, and how to verify, validate, and prioritize requirements within both predictive and agile lifecycles.

Create and analyze models visualize information as diagrams, tables, or structured text to uncover gaps and clarify requirements for PMI PBA exam prep.

Master modelling elaboration by combining traceability and interaction matrices with process flows. Explore prototypes, wireframes, use case diagrams, story mapping, and state tables or diagrams to analyze requirements.

Define and elaborate requirements by refining business, stakeholder, and solution needs using inputs from analysis, models, and elicitation results, with tools like business rules catalog, glossary, backlog, and user stories.

Define acceptance criteria to establish agreement on what constitutes a completed feature and guide tests, with inputs like analysis approach, models, requirements, behavior driven development, and solution evaluation approach.

Verify requirements shows how to ensure high-quality, verifiable product requirements using invest criteria, peer reviews, and regulatory standards, clarifying verification versus validation.

Validate requirements to ensure each requirement aligns with business goals and acceptance criteria, using a traceability matrix, Delphi technique, goal and objectives models, and walkthroughs to confirm stakeholder intent.

Prioritize requirements and other product information by business value, customer importance, risk, and development complexity to produce a prioritized list that guides iterations.

Identify and analyze product risks to proactively address uncertainties affecting definition, development, and outcomes. Use context diagram, ecosystem map, and risk analysis techniques to produce a consolidated product risk analysis.

Assess solution design options by identifying, analyzing, and comparing options against business goals and objectives, expected costs, feasibility, and risks to provide viable product design options and recommendations.

Test ten quiz questions to gauge your knowledge of data models, including data dictionary, data fields and attributes, entity relationship diagrams, and risk and requirements modeling basics.

Explore traceability and monitoring in business analysis by linking requirements to product information, assessing change impact, and maintaining approved data through four key processes.

Define the traceability and monitoring approach within planning to manage requirements changes and determine what to trace. Tailor with retrospectives in agile or a business analysis plan in predictive environments.

Establish relationships and dependencies between product requirements and other product information to ensure business value, meet customer expectations, and control scope using traceability matrix, future model, and requirements management tools.

Select and approve requirements by facilitating stakeholder discussions to negotiate which requirements enter an iteration or release, obtain consensus, establish a validated baseline, and guide change management.

Learn to manage changes to approved requirements and other product information using backlog management, change control, impact analysis, and traceability tools in adaptive and predictive lifecycles.

Navigate the PMI PBA exam topics with quiz-style questions covering process groups, traceability and monitoring, requirement relationships, decision-making techniques, backlog management, and impact analysis.

Apply the four solution evaluation processes to confirm the solution delivers the expected business value, using acceptance criteria, go/no-go decisions, and qualitative or quantitative data.

Evaluate solution performance to determine whether it delivers the intended business value, drawing on inputs such as the business case, goals and objectives, acceptance results, performance data, and evaluation approach.

Define the solution evaluation approach within the business analysis plan by planning metrics, KPIs, and acceptance criteria, and selecting evaluation techniques to measure business value across the product lifecycle.

Evaluate acceptance results against defined criteria to decide release readiness and address defects. Use root cause analysis, variance analysis, and a traceability matrix to prioritize fixes and guide changes.

Obtain solution acceptance for release by guiding a release decision in solution evaluation knowledge area, using inputs such as approved and evaluated requirements, product risk analysis, readiness, and transition plan.

Summarizes metrics, variance analysis, evaluated acceptance results, and the solution evaluation approach, including the product portfolio matrix and growth share matrix, with release decisions tied to business value.

Explore the standard for business analysis per the PMI Guide, recapping the 35 processes and showing how business analysis supports organizational strategy, governance, portfolio, program, and project management.

Explore the six knowledge areas (including needs assessment and stakeholder engagement) and six process groups, detailing the 35 processes, elicitation, analysis, traceability, solution evaluation, and lifecycle interactions.

Explore the defining and aligning process group, linking business analysis to portfolio and program strategy, identifying problems or opportunities, assessing current and future states, and assembling a viable business case.

Define portfolio, program, or project objectives and translate the business case into a charter, aligning stakeholders and resources toward shared scope and outcomes.

The planning process group defines seven business analysis processes to tailor elicitation, analysis, traceability, and evaluation approaches, align stakeholders, and consolidate outputs into the business analysis and project management plans.

Explore the executing process group in PMI PBA, detailing how to elicit, analyze, verify, prioritize, and approve product information and requirements across portfolios, programs, and projects.

Master the monitoring and controlling process group in business analysis for the PMI PBA exam, focusing on stakeholder engagement and communication management, and controlling changes to requirements and product information.

Assess how the releasing processing group decides to release a solution or segment for feedback and transition to an operational team, guiding the release decision.