Business Analyst Leadership

Course overview

It is no longer about control and management, but more about collaboration, consensus, communicating for results, and leadership. Learn to develop leadership skills required to effectively listen, earn trust, and serve as an effective liaison between the business community and the development team. Discover forms of leadership and communication styles that advance your business analyst career. Learn techniques for resolving conflict. Gain hands-on experience in analyzing stages of team development and maximizing user involvement and ownership.

Prerequisites

• A comprehensive introductory business analysis course such as Principles of Business Analysis (HE551S)

Audience

This course is intended for business analysts and related professionals such as Project Managers, QA Managers, Project Customers, TechnicalLeads, Systems Engineers or anyone with a substantive role in the success of projects.

Course objectives

• Apply proven facilitation techniques in requirements gathering meetings
• Explain stages and pitfalls in the project life cycle team development
• Effectively mange the conflict inherent in all projects
• Identify barriers to customer project involvement and ways to overcome them
• Discover ways to communicate when discussing unclear user needs
• Perform collaborative analysis that engages customer ownership
• Create a stakeholder analysis that identifies ownership and risk
• Elicit requirements from users that are resistant to change
• Evaluate and select the most appropriate method to present both quantitative and qualitative results in a form appropriate to various stakeholders

Next steps

• Advanced Business Analysis topics such as Meetings toolbox for business analysts (HE554S)

Benefits to you

• Assess and demonstrate leadership skills and apply proven techniques in leading teams
• Identify and resolve conflicts
• Empower team members through effective communication
• Create high-performance project teams
• Evaluate different motivational approaches and effective communication techniques
• Identify the benefits of using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® in working with project teams

Course outline

• Identify successful leadership practices and define the optimum Business Analyst Leadership style in phases of the systems requirements life cycle
• Explain the role of the business analyst and discuss professional responsibility in the context of leadership
• Relate the role of the user to the goals of the project team

Effective Teams

• Delineate types of business analysis problem domains and the team requirements
• Create a high-accountability relationship with the user community, a high-performance relationship with developers, and a high-respect relationship with the project manager
• Discuss challenges in the relationship between the project manager and the business analyst and overcome barriers to project team performance

Managing Conflict and Agreement

• Define conflict and identify conflict management outcomes
• Choose a conflict resolution approach
• Explain user involvement and how to manage agreement

Facilitation Skills

• Define key elements of successful facilitation
• Identify different types of requirements gathering techniques
• Conduct a requirements gathering workshop

Stakeholder Analysis Skills

• Define key elements of successful stakeholder analysis
• Conduct effective interviews with users that are resistant to change
• Develop strategies for recovering troubled projects

Enhancing Communication Skills

• Define communication rules for non-technical audiences
• Use various interviewing skills in requirements gathering
• Identify issues in managing distributed teams

Presentation Challenges and Techniques

• Describe key techniques for presenting complex features or process flows
• Describe different methods for prioritizing needs
• Develop strategies to continually validate requirements throughout the project cycle