Facilitating Requirements for Business Analysis
Overview

3 day course: The art of bringing people together, face-to-face or remotely, to gather requirements and gain consensus on solutions is a critical success factor for all business analysts. This course teaches facilitation techniques that can be used for structured sessions and “facilitation-on-the-fly”. This course goes beyond traditional facilitation training by focusing on facilitation techniques specific to gathering business and functional requirements.

This class is limited to 8 students, allowing each student the opportunity to practice facilitating multiple requirements gathering sessions in a “safe” environment with personalised feedback. Students will spend 60% of class time participating in interactive, real-world business case studies and performing each key role in at least one session. The workshops in this course require students to plan the requirements gathering session, develop the correct questions to ask the group and facilitate the group to a consensus on the requirements using one of the learned techniques. Students will conduct a requirements gathering session for at least one requirement deliverable (i.e., context level dataflow diagram, workflow diagram).



Intended audience

This course is designed for experienced, knowledgeable business analysts involved with requirements gathering. Students are expected to understand the purpose of business and functional requirements.

Prerequisites

We recommend that students first attend our Essential Skills for the Business Analyst class or have experience in project scope definition, gathering requirements from subject matter experts and understanding how business requirements fit into the entire systems development effort.

Earn

21 IIBA CDUs and PMI PDUs



Course Outcomes

In this course students will learn to:

  • Facilitate using proven techniques for business requirements gathering.
  • Identify when and how to use each technique.
  • Develop confidence and a skill set to conduct facilitated sessions.
  • Actively practice learned skills and techniques.
  • Use a requirements planning session template.
  • Prepare the participants for the requirements gathering session.
  • Perform each facilitation role through role playing each session.
  • Conduct the session to stay focused on the core requirement that was planned as a deliverable.
  • Select which facilitation technique to use for each core requirement being gathered.
  • Verify that requirements are testable and generate testing objectives.
  • Complete checklists for managing and conducting the session.
  • Facilitate a requirements gathering session.