Business Analysis for Project Success: Enhance Essential Knowledge, Ideas and Methodologies

Objectives

• Define the nature of business problems and link it to business directions
• Apply strategic thinking and leadership to business needs analysis
• Recognise and actively manage divergent stakeholder expectations
• Elicit and analyse pertinent business information from a wide range of sources
• Use proven diagnostic and analytical tools to organize, verify, validate and prioritise requirements
• Document and justify clear, concise and effective project requirements

Outline

• Introduction and key concepts
o Projects in the modern world
o Business Analysis as a key to project success. Lessons for an accidental profession
o Projects, programs, endeavours
o Project lifecycle
• Strategic thinking and leadership in business analysis
o Business analysis and strategic thinking
o Understanding business context and direction
o Managing project stakeholders, understanding perspectives
• Project initiation
o The key questions at project initiation
o Definition of project requirements
• Collecting and organizing project requirements
o Requirements elicitation and knowledge types
o Business needs analysis
o Elicitation techniques
o Use of questionnaires and surveys
• Advanced elicitation techniques
o Managing divergent expectations
o Effective facilitation of stakeholder workshops; establishing effective group decision processes
o Facilitation tools and techniques that counter typical errors, biases and inefficiencies
o Techniques for building agreement
o Nominal group technique and affinity diagram
o Process analysis tools
• Prioritising requirements
o Requirements prioritisation techniques
o Managing stakeholder differences
• Evaluating options
o Formulating and considering alternative solutions
o Decision criteria and option analysis
• Documenting requirements
o Persona analysis
o Verification and validation of requirements
o Creating project scope statement
o Defining project priorities
o Ensuring the requirements are actionable and practical, avoiding the traps
o Implementation planning, stakeholder alignment and change management considerations
• Planning the delivery of project requirements
o Project requirements and Work Breakdown Structure
o Requirements traceability
o Using the Critical Path Method to manage deadline requirements
o Managing budget and resource requirements
o Identifying and mitigating project risks
• Achieving project success through effective control
o Fundamentals of effective project monitoring and control
o Refining project requirements and managing variations
o Managing project creeps
• Benefit realization
o Managing change
o Managing project completion
o End-of-project processes and lessons learned
o Benefit realisation reviews
• Advanced topics in business analysis

Who Should Attend ?

This course will benefit professionals who are involved in project initiation and would like to be able to effectively understand business requirements, define their projects and convince stakeholders to support them.
The Business Analysis for Project Success training course will equally appeal to decision makers and those who support them in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors.