BUSINESS SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

Business systems analysis is the evolving discipline that deals with identifying your business information technology needs. It includes expressing these needs as business requirements, processes and rules (hereafter business requirements) that the business community and information professionals both interpret the same way. Business requirements serve as the basis for development, testing, deployment, and use of your future information systems. They are the starting point for lifecycle management and business driven development. In a nutshell, these are the critical success factors for delivering information technology that the business community needs and wants.

Business Systems Analysis Curriculum is designed specifically to address the three most common failure points. This Curriculum is targeted toward Business Analysts, System Analysts, Business Systems Analysts, Business System Architects, or other professionals who are engaged in the discipline of gathering, understanding, and translating business needs into technology solutions.

Introduction to Business Systems Analysis

• Approaching business systems analysis
• The business perspective
• Business rule basics
• Context Diagramming - Identifying system functionality from a business/user
  perspective
• Utilizing visual models & artifacts for business analysis

Analyzing Business Processes – Process Mapping

• Defining business processes
• Identifying process activities
• Business activity relationships
• Conditional dependencies
• External and temporal events
• Process Improvement Tips
• Process mapping case study/exercise

Analyzing Business Data Requirements – E/R Diagramming

• Role and characteristics of business data
• Basic data concepts: entity types, attributes, relationships
• Reading E/R diagrams
• Data modeling case study/exercise

Analyzing Process-Data Interaction – State Transition Diagramming

• Entity life cycle Concepts
• Defining state transition rules/operations
• The state transition diagram
• State transition case study/exercise

Analyzing Business Transactions – Activity Diagramming

• The standard flow of events
• Alternatives and exceptions
• Analyzing and improving process oriented business rules
• Refinement via UI prototyping
• Activity diagramming case study/exercise

Documenting, Organizing and Managing Business Requirements – The Use Case

• What is a use case
• Components of a use case
• Structuring use-cases
• Review of specimen use cases
• Assembling and packaging the requirements document
• Tracing business and user requirements
  

Lessons From the Edge

• Tips and best practices
• Setting the project scope
• Requirements discovery techniques
• Change management techniques
• Brief review of analysis tools
• Recommended reading