Skills Enhancement for Business System Analysis Techniques in the Public Sector

Course Overview

Business systems analysis is quite simply, the analysis of business systems. Usually, a BSA's work focuses on the mechanization and automatization of business processes. A BSA works with business processes, tools, people, and culture and has a focus on a business's strategy.

Participants will gain knowledge of the best techniques and methods for gathering requirements from users and other stakeholders; develop business and data models that describe these requirements and write detailed specifications that provide an accurate blueprint for the designing, building, and testing of the proposed system. They will also learn how business systems analysis techniques can be related and integrated using the Architecture Framework to ensure that all the requirements are comprehensively described and correctly defined.

Course Objectives

At the end of this course the participants will be able to:

• Understand the role of the business systems analyst
• Understand the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
• Define the system scope
• Identify system stakeholders
• Create a business case
• Understand and apply The Architecture Framework
• Model the business across all its dimensions: data, activities, locations, people, time and motivation
• Apply information gathering techniques
• Define functional and non-functional business requirements
• Write a business requirements specification

Course Coverage

Topic 1: Introduction to Business Systems Analysis

• The role of the business systems analyst
• The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
• The business systems analysis process
• Identifying system users and other stakeholders
• Defining the system scope
• Creating a business case

Topic 2: Modeling the Business

• An introduction to modeling concepts
• The Architecture Framework
• Modeling data requirements
• Business process modeling for business systems analysis

Topic 3: Modeling the Business (Continued)

• Writing and modeling use cases
• Modeling the location dimension
• Modeling organizations, people and roles
• Analyzing business and time events
• Discovering and documenting business rules

Topic 4: Gathering Information

• Communication for business systems analysts
• Interviewing methods
• Using questionnaires
• Document analysis and observation
• Workshop facilitation using Joint Application Design (JAD) techniques
• Eliciting and capturing requirements in workshops

Topic 5: Preparing a Business Requirements Specification

• Functional and non-functional requirements
• Writing effective requirements
• Validating requirements
• The content of a business requirements specification

Targeted Groups:

Analysts, managers, and professionals who are looking to build their analytical skills as well as those who are interested in improving their decision-making capabilities based on analytical evidence