Description
In this two-day workshop (updated September 2020), participants will learn and practice effective business analysis techniques that can be applied in an Agile environment. This course explores the role and responsibilities of a Lean-Agile Business Analyst and equips them with the essential skills to be successful on Agile projects. Participants will relate the values and principles of various agile frameworks to understand how they can contribute value. This is a practical course that explains how a Business Analyst can support a Product Owner, Scrum Master, the Agile Team and their clients from the inception of a business or product idea through the formulation of its vision, the discovery of its capabilities and features, the articulation of the epics and user stories, and the prioritization, refinement, and management of the backlog items.
Incorporating lean and agile concepts and methods from Scrum, SAFe, the Agile Project Framework, Kanban and more with insights from experts like Jeff Patton, Mike Cohn, Dean Leffingwell and others, this course is agile agnostic and ideally suited for those working in any of those environments – or others. Business Analysts working with tools like Jira, CA Agile (Rally), Planview (Innotas), IBM, VersionOne, Daptive (ChangePoint), Clarity, PowerSteering, Enterprise Architect or Targetprocess will also find this course extremely valuable by learning the best practices these tools require. Private online training workshops can also be tailored to your toolset and needs.
Course Outline
Fundamentals
- Lean and Agile Concepts for Business Analysis
- Lean Business Analysis Values and Principles
- Agile Business Analysis Values and Principles
- The Role of the Lean-Agile BA
- The Lean-Agile Approach to Requirements
Starting with a Vision
- The Product Visioning Discovery Canvas
- The Product Vision Box
- Facilitated Visioning Workshops
- Ensuring Strategic Alignment
Building the Product Backlog
- Contextual Modeling
- Visualizing the Product with Story Mapping
- Starting with a Backbone and Walking Skeleton
- Using Use Cases to Discover User Stories
- The Use Case Discovery Canvas
- Steps to Elicit and Describe a Use Case
- Use Case Exercise
- Story Mapping Exercise
- The Product Backlog
User Stories: The Canvas (Card), Conversation, and Confirmation
- What Makes a Good User Story?
- The Definition of Ready
- Writing User Stories
- The User Story Discovery Canvas
- User Story Canvas Exercise
- Acceptance Criteria
- Using Use Cases to Describe User Stories & Discover AC
- User Story Conversation Exercise
- Splitting Stories
- Sizing User Stories with Planning Poker
- Prioritizing User Stories
- Including Non-Functional Requirements
- Other Business Analysis Models
- Business Analyst’s Role in a Sprint
Wrap up
- Transitioning to Agile Business Analysis
- Developing you Personalized Roadmap to Success
- Q&A, Review and Close
IAG Training Experience
Whether you are attending online or in person, in a public or a private in-house classroom, our courses are designed to provide an enjoyable, engaging and effective learning environment. Our instructors are all experienced practitioners and our courses all include demonstrations, examples, and exercises to make the content relevant and meaningful.
For our virtual remote training classes, we follow our proprietary Collaborative Online Learning Model which emphasizes engagement and experiential learning with lots of video and chat-based group discussion, and quizzes, and exercises to make your time with us fun and productive.
We use Microsoft Teams Meeting and Mural for our visual modeling demonstrations and group exercises. Participants also have access to the Teams site and Mural workplace for 60 days to review and download the many handouts, templates and examples from the class.
Participants receive a participant guide as well as access to our online class workspace for templates, handouts, samples and additional reference material.
Who Should Attend
This workshop is intended for business analysts, project leaders, product owners or agile team members performing business analysis tasks. This is not an introduction to agile, lean or scrum but provides in depth methods and techniques for agile business activities within a lean or agile project/environment.
Trevor B. –
Thank-you. Finally a decent Agile course for Business Analysts. This answered a lot of practical questions for me that I am going to take back to my org and hopefully work into our Scrum process.
Amanda –
I enjoyed this course. It was all valuable information that I hope I can use in my daily responsibilities.
Jay –
Really good course for BA’s and any Agile Team. Not just a rehash of Agile 101 basics. And excellent instructor too. I would love if all our BA’s (and our CSM’s) took this.