Business Analysis Soft Skills: Conversations and Workshops
What you'll learn
- Define and distinguish five specific requirements elicitation approaches from one-on-one Requirements Interviews to Requirements Gathering Workshops
- Evaluate the pros and cons of each approach for your organization and project
- Prepare, perform, and manage effective requirements gathering interviews and workshops
- Use informational and active listening to discover hidden requirements during interviews and workshops
- Recognize the specific challenges and strengths of facilitated requirements workshops involving cross-functional groups of stakeholders
- Improve your interviewing skills by analyzing the best-practice attitudes and characteristics of effective interviewers
Requirements
- No technical background required
- Need to express requirements for an IT solution
- Need to interview project stakeholders to get business requirements
- No additional materials required
Description
How Can You Effectively Communicate with Your Stakeholders?
A lot of initial uncertainty at the beginning of an IT project comes from not knowing how to approach stakeholders to get their requirements. Should you interview each stakeholder individually or in groups? Whom should you interview first? What can you do to guide stakeholders to give you the information you need to formulate the right requirements?
Unfortunately getting other stakeholders to express their needs and wants vis-à-vis a proposed IT solution is a non-trivial challenge. On top of that, you might be dealing with cross-functional needs which complicates the task even more.
To meet that challenge, we propose that you need to hone your interpersonal skills, in particular your interviewing skills. If you have never interviewed another person before, this task alone can be intimidating.
Why Should You Take This Course?
Since interviewing other people for requirements is not an intuitive skill, this course presents a wide range of techniques for planning, preparing, and performing requirements elicitation interviews and workshops as well as polishing and publishing the results. It defines the characteristics of a good requirements interviewer to help you recognize areas for personal growth.
To guide you through the intricacies of conducting group interviews, it includes expert advice on facilitating effective Requirements Workshops (ie. JAD, RDW, User Story Workshops, Requirements Gathering Workshops, etc.), a powerful requirements elicitation technique for managing cross-functional group meetings on traditional and Agile software development methodologies.
Who this course is for:
- Subject Matter Experts
- Agile Product Owners
- Business Analysts
- Project Leaders and Managers
- Line Managers
- Systems Analysts
- Software Testers
- Business Architects
- AND "anyone wearing the business analysis hat", meaning anyone responsible for defining what a project should deliver will benefit from this class. Although it is directed toward Information Technology projects, all of the techniques will benefit you on any project, professional or personal.
Instructor
![Tom and Angela Hathaway](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64"%3E%3C/svg%3E){kind=avatar}
- 4.4 Instructor Rating
- 11,694 Reviews
- 78,591 Students
- 17 Courses
Angela and Tom Hathaway of BA-EXPERTS (previously Hathaway & Associates, Inc. and Requirements Solutions Group, LLC) have been in business analysis and UX (User Experience) design for over 30 years. Their expertise spans information technology, methodologies, and innumerable applications in every industry for organizations from Mom-and-Pop shops to Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. In their writings and lectures they strive for enlightening while entertaining.
They have taught many thousands of students around the world and facilitated hundreds of requirements discovery sessions under a variety of acronyms (JAD, ASAP, JADr, JRP, etc). In recent years, they have focused their attention on human-machine communication, in particular how to improve the use of Chatbots.
Current and past customers include TIAA-CREF (Financial), Cathay Pacific, Emirates Airlines (Transportation), Manitoba Telecom Services (Telecommunications), Honeywell (Manufacturing), Starwood Hotels and Resorts (Hospitality), numerous government agencies, and a myriad of other organizations.
Tom and Angela's training, consulting, and mentoring efforts have saved their customers around the world millions of dollars. They can help your organization evolve and improve your conversational user interface, business analysis, and UX Design practices.