Detailing Business Data Requirements
Overview

3 day course: Understanding and documenting business data requirements is a critical component in defining complete requirements. Every process uses data and almost all business rules are enforced by data. Missing a critical piece of data or incorrectly defining a data element contributes to the majority of maintenance problems and results in systems that do not reflect the business needs. This course teaches students an in-depth approach to identify and define all necessary data components using both textual templates and an entity relationship diagram. Students will be given data templates with a suggested documentation structure for defining business data requirements. In addition students will be shown how to document data using an entity relationship diagram to produce a logical data model in combination with the supporting detailed templates.

Even if your organisation has a data administrator or data warehouse team who is responsible for documenting and managing the organisation’s information needs, every project uses a subset of that enterprise information in its own unique way. Business analysts must understand the importance of data in all of their projects and include data requirements in their business requirements documentation. Failing to document which data elements need to be used in a calculation, or displayed on a report, leaves the developer the responsibility of choosing the correct pieces of business data from hundreds if not thousands of available fields. These missing requirements often lead to expensive and lengthy project delays during the testing phase.



Intended audience

This course is designed for business analysts, systems analysts, data administrators, database administrators, or any other project team member involved with business analysis. This course may also be appropriate for individuals who manage business analysts or those who work with the business requirements document and need a more in-depth understanding of the process and documentation.

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 understand 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:

  • Identify core data requirements beginning with project initiation.
  • Identify excellent data requirements at the appropriate level of detail.
  • Detail the data requirements (using a suggested documentation structure and templates in Microsoft Word format or using an entity relationship diagram).
  • Identify and detail attributive, associative, subtype and supertype entities.
  • Detail complex data-related business rules.
  • Discriminate between business data (logical data) and database design (physical data).
  • Assist with the transition of business data to database design.
  • Utilise easy normalisation techniques (without all the mathematical theory).
  • Validate data requirements with activity (process or use case) requirements.