Business Analysis Foundation™

The Business Analysis Foundation course is the cornerstone of the BCS Business Analysis Curriculum. It is an internationally-recognised qualification relevant to anyone requiring an understanding of Business Analysis including business analysts, business managers and their staff, business change managers, project managers, system developers.

Learning Outcomes

The Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis will help participants to:

• Understand the roles and responsibilities of Business Analyst in relation to the other roles typically found in the wider project and technical teams
• Understand a generic Business Change Lifecycle and their role from initial business case, design, implementation and ultimately the realisation of benefits
• Attain new skills to successfully develop, manage, and communicate business requirements and be a productive and contributing member of a project team

The foundation course covers the broad range of principles and techniques within the sphere of Business Analysis, including:

• What is Business Analysis
• The Competencies of a Business Analyst
• The Strategic Context for Business Analysis
• The Business Analysis Service Framework
• Investigating the Business Situation
• Analysing and Managing Stakeholders
• Improving Business Services and Processes
• Defining the Solution
• Making the Business Case
• Establishing the Requirements
• Documenting and Modelling Requirements
• Validating and Managing Requirements
• Delivering the Requirements
• Delivering the Business Solution

Course Contents

1. What Is Business Analysis

• Describe the business change lifecycle
• List the following principles of business analysis
• Describe the variants of the business analyst role

2. The Competencies Of A Business Analyst

• Explain the concept of the T-shaped Professional
• Identify the three areas of business analysis competency

3. The Strategic Context For Business Analysis

• Describe business analysis and the strategic context
• Define the factors assessed using PESTLE to analyse an external environment
• Identify the elements of the VMOST technique used to analyse an internal environment
• Describe the following elements of performance measurement
• Describe the structure of a SWOT analysis
• Describe the POPIT and Business Model Canvas techniques used in strategy execution

4. The Business Analysis Service Framework, Incorporating The Following Services:

• Situation investigation and problem analysis
• Feasibility assessment and business case development
• Business process improvement
• Requirement’s definition
• Business acceptance testing
• Business change deployment
• Stakeholder engagement

5. Investigating The Business Situation

• Understand the purpose of workshops
• Understand the purpose of observation
• Understand the purpose of interviews
• Understand the purpose of scenarios
• Understand the purpose of prototyping
• Define user role analysis
• Define quantitative approaches including: Surveys or questionnaires, Activity sampling, Document analysis
• Describe the Rich pictures Mind maps, two diagrammatic techniques used to record a business situation

6. Analysing And Managing Stakeholders

• Identify stakeholder categories using the stakeholder wheel
• Describe the Power/Interest grid technique to analyse stakeholders
• Describe stakeholder responsibilities using RASCI (RACI) technique

7. Improving Business Services And Processes

• Explain the business process hierarchy
• Describe aspects of the event response level (UML activity diagrams, or process swimlane diagrams)
• Describe aspect of the actor-task level (Tasks writing the UML activity diagram)
• Analysis considerations at actor-task level (Steps or ‘work instructions’ supporting each Task level)
• Understand the concepts of the as-is and to-be process models
• Identify generic approaches to improving business processes
• Define the purpose of customer journey maps

8. Defining The Solution

• Describe the gap analysis process
• Explain the use of POPIT in gap analysis
• Describe the process for developing options
• Describe the purpose of design thinking

9. Making The Business Case

• Describe the lifecycle for a business case in business case development
• Identify the areas of feasibility assessment
• Define the structure and contents of a business case
• Understand categories of costs and benefits
• Understand the importance of an early impact assessment
• Understand a business risk assessment in relation to the options presented
• Explain the purpose of the following investment appraisal techniques; payback, discounted cash flow (net present value) and internal rate of return
• List the key features relevant to the production of a business case within an Agile contex

10. Establishing The Requirements

• Explain the requirements engineering framework
• Understand the role of different actors in requirements engineering
• Understand the categories of requirements, business, technical, functional and non-functional
• Describe the hierarchy of requirements
• Describe requirements elicitation techniques
• Understand requirements analysis, including; requirements filters, INVEST, MoSCoW and Business rules

11. Documenting And Modelling Requirements

• Understand requirements documentation styles including; text-based documentation styles and Diagrammatic documentation styles
• Define the structure of the business requirements document
• Understand the importance of the requirements catalogue
• Describe the format of user stories
• Describe the elements of the use case diagram used to model functional requirements
• Describe the elements of a class model used to model data
• Describe the product backlog in modelling and documentation in an Agile environment

12. Validating And Managing Requirements

• Formal requirements validation
• The activities in the Agile requirements validation process
• Describe traceability and change control in relation to requirements management

13. Delivering The Requirements

• Describe the following types of delivery lifecycle; waterfall lifecycle, the “V” model, the incremental lifecycle and the iterative lifecycle (Agile)

14. Delivering the Business Solution

• Explain the role of the business analyst in the business change lifecycle
• Describe the role of the business analyst during the design, development and test stages
• Describe the SARAH (a person focused organisational change management tool) and a business readiness assessment technique
• Describe how the benefits plan is used in the realisation stage