Agile Business Analysis

As a product manager, project manager, or business analyst, how can you work with in an agile environment to deliver what your customers want, when they want it?

This course introduces the concept of agile and explores the typical roles and activities found in an agile environment:

• Articulate Agile terminology in both context for a product development team and a business stakeholders.
• Identify the differences and similarities between Predictive, Iterative and Adaptive planning approaches for delivering value
• Understand how a Business Analyst can reflect requirements through user stories that help to define system functions.
• Utilize Business Analysis skills in order to establish traceability of a user story to the developed product.
• Understand how to utilize story points to size completion of user stories in an iteration.
• Learn how to better understand your customer’s needs through tools and techniques such as product vison statements, personas and journey maps.
• Experience the scrum framework in action using a case study including Business Analysis skills to refine a product story backlog.
• Utilize prioritization and value definition skills to select the proper user stories from a product back to an iteration backlog.
• Participate in Iteration retrospectives to help the team improve velocity and product quality.
• How the Business Analyst can coach other members of the team to make value delivery more effective.

Curriculum Topics:

• The evolution of Agile and how it fits into today’s organizations
• Brief introduction to the Scrum framework
• Using decomposition for planning and prioritizing
• Gathering and managing stakeholder priorities with participatory decision-making
• Creating effective journey maps and user stories
• Initiation and execution of projects using an agile approach

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the various planning approaches that are used in an agile environment.
• Explain the importance of providing a Definition of Done
• Understand the concept of developing a minimum viable product and how they influence an Agile iteration.
• Describe the scrum framework including typical team roles and responsibilities. 
• Develop a user story and explain how to prepare user stories for development by the agile team.

Course Format:

The format of this course is online. Prior to 4pm PST on the start date of the course, an email will be sent to all registered students containing instructions on how to access the online Learning Management System. You should expect to spend 6 to 10 hours per week during the 6 weeks of the course.