Business Analysis Agility (Partner Event)

This is a partner event, delivered by the Atlantic Systems Guild & IRM UK. You can book directly using the links below

Solving the right business problem is absolutely crucial for software and product development. Therefore the emphasis of this course is to show you how to work with your customers in a more agile way to ensure that you—and they—discover the right problem. In short, we show you how the business analyst is crucial to good agile development, and how you become a valued member of the agile team.

The business analysts work closely with the customers to establish their work and its needs, and to ensure that the real business problem—it’s not always obvious, and not always what is said—is clearly understood by everybody.

To uncover the problem, the agile business analyst uses multiple candidate solutions to probe the customers, their objectives and their values. Candidate solutions are the preferred way of working as they have shown themselves to be extremely effective at prompting customers to reveal their real problems and underlying needs.

Business analysts use a story map to communicate the requirements for the solution to the developers. This means that the analysts and the developers work together iteratively and incrementally. The analysts are adding stories about the needs of the solution and the customers as the developers enhance and retrieve the stories in time for each development cycle. With co-ordination from the product owner, the analysts and the developers synchronise their efforts so business analysis results are delivered just in time for the next development cycle.

The emphasis throughout is on close collaboration, and a relentless focus on solving the right problem.

This course gives you a different approach to business analysis. This one provides a business analysis framework that works regardless of whether you are part of an agile environment and need to provide stories for iterative development, or whether you are in a traditional environment and need to produce a requirements specification suitable for more formalised environments and outsourcing.

You learn how to:

• Find the customer (or user) segments, and determine which of them yields the best, and the earliest value
• Use safe-to-fail probes to ensure that a candidate solution solves the right problem and delivers the right value.
• Deploy an iterative approach to discovering the real problem, and progressively feed the right stories to the delivery activity.
• Understand that by discovering the right needs and solving the right problem, you deliver real value to your customer and your sponsor.
• Do business analysis more quickly and effectively.