(BA123): The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning Workshop for the BA & PO

This workshop provides hands-on experience implementing the Business Analysis function on an agile project. Working through a case study, you’ll gain a practical understanding of where the Business Analysis function fits into agile and Scrum and the value Business Analysis brings to the team and the business. You’ll learn how to use your BA skills to shepherd an initiative from the strategic business level down to the ‘weeds’ of requirements trawling and analysis while keeping the team focused on business value. By the end of this course, you’ll have gained practical experience applying the BA function over the course of an agile project using an approach that integrates the best agile Business Analysis practices from Scrum, Lean Startup, Extreme Programming (XP), Use Case 2.0 and Kanban with some of the most effective agile analysis tools developed in the field.

Benefits to the Organization:

In the arguments over agile versus traditional approaches to software development, Business Analysis (BA) has sometimes been ignored . As a result, the product backlog is loaded with items that are difficult to reconcile with over-arching business goals and difficult to estimate and prioritize. The truth is - agile projects, with their increased emphasis on communication, depend more heavily than ever on individuals (whatever their job title) who know how to structure their conversations with stakeholders for maximum benefit, manage a complex set of requirements and able to pull the right lean analysis techniques out of their ‘back pockets’ when they need them. Companies are finding that agile analysis is not as simple as they had anticipated. But as teams have tried to implement agile approaches without people trained in agile Business Analysis, they have experienced the following challenges:
• Challenges in mapping requirements to sprints so that the combined effect provides real value to the business with each iteration
• Challenges scaling agile – an approach that emerged from small companies – to large, highly regulated companies and organizations
• Challenges splitting ‘epics’ into User Stories that are small enough to fit into short iterations yet significant enough to add value
• Challenges creating persistent requirements documentation from agile artifacts

If you or your organization have been experiencing any of the above challenges, this course will provide you with tools to address them – through hands-on training that clarifies exactly which business analysis technique or tool to employ based on the scenario, and how to carry out the BA discipline so that business interests are addressed and highlighted throughout the agile life cycle.