CBAP Full Course 2026 [FREE] | CBAP Training For Beginners | Business Analyst Course | Simplilearn

requirements clearly and recommend solutions that create real value and that is exactly why business analysis has become so important skill and for professionals who want to grow in this field CBA is one of the most recognized certification that shows strong knowledge of business analysis practices and frameworks. So in this course you will be learning the key concepts of business analysis based on the Babok guide V3 framework where we will be covering the core knowledge areas important techniques exam related concept and practical applications used by business analyst in real projects. So whether you are preparing for the CBA exam or simply want to strengthen your business analysis understanding this course will give you a solid foundation. Let's look at the agenda. First, we'll understand the CABAP certification including the exam structure, eligibility application process and course requirements. Next, we'll be exploring the fundamentals of business analysis including the BACCM model, the six Babok knowledge areas. Next, we'll move into key areas like planning, monitoring, elicitation, collaboration, strategy analysis, and requirements. After that, we will cover important business analysis techniques like brainstorming, interview, SWAT analysis, root cause analysis and many more. And finally, we will look at real world case studies and project work that will help you apply these concepts in a very practical way. Also, if you are interested in boosting your career in business analysis, do not forget to check out our AI powered business analyst course. Now, this course is perfect for professionals who are looking to enhance their skills with the latest tools like PowerBI, Excel, SQL, all while gaining hands-on experience with real world projects. Also, you'll be learning how to leverage generative AI for smarter, faster decision-m. Our program is IIBA Babok V3 aligned and it will help you prepare for certifications like CBA, CCBA where you will engage with 10 plus industry projects, 40 plus practical activities and benefit from live online sessions led by experts. Plus, with simply learn job assist, you will be getting the support you need to land your next big role. So, what are you waiting for? Hurry up and enroll now. The courseing is mentioned below. So before we get started, here's a quick quiz question. Which of the following is one of the six core concepts in the BACCM model? Your options are budget, context, coding or marketing? Let me know your answers in the comment section below. Okay, let's get on with the introduction to CBA. What are we going to cover this here? We are going to cover talk about IABA uh benefits of the IABA professional certification. uh criteria for CBA certification uh the exam application process the exam outline and reertification requirements. Um IABA is stands for international institute of business analysis business analysis. Uh it is the uh professional body which sets the standards for business analysis. They do that through what is known as the Babok guide. We will hear you will hear that term again and again. It stands for business analysis body of knowledge. Okay. Um AABA also looks at a skill matrix and defines the competency model for uh BAS. We will look at the competency model or the skills that you need to be successful as a BA later uh in the uh in the session today. It will also look at recognizing your knowledge and experience through certification. So there are three certifications that IABA provides. The entry-level certification is called ECBA. The mid-level certification is called CCBA and the professional level certification is called CBAP. Um so we these are the three certifications that IBA has implemented in order to um recognize your knowledge and experience and expertise as a business analyst. There are um you need you can take an IIBA membership. You can take membership with IIBA. The membership fee will depend on which part of the world you are in. There is a tired um membership fee structure for IABA. If you take an take a membership, there are certain benefits that comes with it. You will get to volunteer with them. You will be able to develop your communication skills. There are some events that IIBA chapters conduct. You can uh participate in it. You can network with other BAS. You can learn from experts. uh you will be getting access to all the knowledge materials within IABA. You can use that to learn. Um so these are some of the benefits of the IAB membership. Um what are the bits of CBA certification? I won't read through all of these things. It will give you a recognition as an individual. You can achieve uh a a career goal through CBA certification. Typically certified analysts are paid slightly higher than those who are not um certified. So these are some of the benefits. You can read through the slides. You will get the slides in your LMS as um as the trainer slides. You can you can go through this. I won't go through each point by point. I think that's something which is self-explanatory. Um this is also another useful information for you. Many organizations will support or fund those who wants to certif get certified as as sebap. Uh and the benefit of the organization are listed here. So they can showcase their uh the commitment to professional development, the level of uh maturity of knowledge of their staff. Um they can make sure that they follow standard processes. Um they can ensure that their deliverables have certain level of quality. So these are some of the key benefits to the organizations. Now the reason why we are telling you this is you can use this to negotiate with your employer to support or fund your um your your examination and your certification. Okay. Now comes I think the more critical part which is the eligibility criteria. uh in order for your sebap uh certification by your IABA not from simply learn from simply learn we we already discuss the three criteria from IIBA you would need to have a minimum of a total 7,500 hours of BA experience in the last 10 years uh it roughly translates to if you are working as a full-time BA 4 to 5 years of business analysis experience is what you um need to uh in order for you to be eligible for SABA certification from IIBA. Not only that, within that 7,500 hours, you need to have 900 hours in four of the six knowledge areas. So, we will go through the knowledge areas in um in detail. So in any four of the six knowledge areas that are there there needs to have a minimum of 900 hours that should be there. In addition to that you need to have professional development for 35 hours which is what we are going to get through the uh course. So once you complete the course you will get a certificate from simply learn which is an endorsed education provider of IABA. So you will you can use that to claim that you need to provide two references um and then sign the code of conduct. So these are the uh eligibility criteria for uh CBA certification. Now the obvious question is what if you don't have BA experience? Many of you are having zero BA experience. So the first thing is that your title need not be BA. The work that you have done has to be B that of a BA. So for example, if you have worked as a QA in software industry, you might not have your designation might have been that of a tester, right? But you have worked on say for example um solution evaluation, what we call as the knowledge area solution evaluation. You can claim that, right? You might have done stakeholder management that you can claim in as as business analysis, planning and monitoring. So there might be certain part of the work that you have done which could be considered as business analysis work that you can claim for your certification. If you have even after that if you do not have uh enough number of hours you need to look at some of the more uh beginnerfriendly certifications from IAB. You can look at CCBA you can look at um ECBA which does not require any uh experience whatsoever. Now in order to land a BA job what you need to do is you need to convince an employer that you have the skills that are necessary to perform as a BA. So that is where the this course the projects that you do uh any volunteering opportunities that that you utilize in order to uh build those skills and actually uh implement them in real life will come into picture. So these are some of the and this is the eligibility criteria for the CPAP certification. Um I will take a pause here and check for any questions that might be there at this moment. Now if you are going to apply for the CBAP exam uh this is the process that you will follow. Uh so you will first apply for the exam uh for the certification and uh pay for the certification. Uh when you are paying for the certification you will document your experience. So you will say I have worked um in each of the knowledge area for so many hours in total I have worked in so many projects. These are the projects. when you are documenting your experience, you will provide contacts who will be then approached by IABA to validate your experience. Okay, so that's the first step. The second step is you pay for the exam. Once you pay for the exam, you have up to one year in order to register for the exam and take the exam. So once you pay for the exam once you have done the preparations you will register for the exam for a specific slot and then you take the exam. Okay. So that is the application and exam process. The application fee uh if you are not a member of um IABA the application fee is $145 45 which is the same as that of a member but the exam fee is um $55 for a non-member and $350 for a member. Now even if you are not a member check within your organization some of the organizations have memberships and tie-ups with IIBA where you will get a discount on your IIBA uh exam fee. Okay. So that's the uh application fee if you are uh getting reertified. So like I I did my certification in 2019. Every 3 year you need to get uh reertified. I got resertified in 2022 and then again last year. So when you get resertified, if you are a member, you need to pay $85. If you are not a member, you need to pay $120. Now the reason this is important is if you look at the difference between the fee for a member and a non-member, it is roughly $150. Right? There are uh some places where the membership will be much cheaper. Like in India for example where I was taking the exam uh it was around $50 or $55 or something like that. So it worked out cheaper for me to take the membership and then uh give the uh exam or give the certification. Um how do you prepare for the exam? So we will go through the Babok guide throughout the course. Uh but you need to read through the Babok guide. You should be very comfortable with the Babok guide. Uh there are some material available in the online library in the IIBA website. Go through that. Go through the FAQs in the IIBA website. There are some other resources that are suggested by IIBA. You can go through that. Um you can try to find a mentor. There are study groups that you can find within IABA uh clubs. Um and then uh you review you the one step which I will definitely suggest is especially for those who are planning for CBAP exam is take the um uh simply learn um tests very seriously. Uh they are uh slightly on the tougher um side than the actual IIA exams. So if you if you do decently in the um simply learn exams, you are likely to uh do well in the CBA test. The exam consists of 120 questions. All of them are multiple choice. Uh it is a uh three and a half hour test. Okay. Now what does the exam has? There are like I said there are six knowledge areas. Each each knowledge area has a certain weightage. You can see that on the screen. uh you can see for example requirement analysis and design of nation which is a key knowledge area for uh business analyst has highest weightage at uh 30%. Uh and then the rest is roughly equally distributed. Um but we we will go through each of the um uh domain or each of the knowledge areas in detail. Um the assessment that you have within simply learn will give you the simply learn certificate that is not the IIBA certificate. For the IIBA certificate is where you have to register within IIBA and provide the exam and pass it. That is when you will get the IIBA sebation. Uh sorry I missed the beginning. So if you have question do I need to ask you? Um so what we do uh tendu hopefully I'm pronouncing your name right um is that I will cover a topic like we did just for the eligibility and the exam etc. After that I will open the floor for questions. You can ask them in the chat. I will pick up those questions um uh and then um uh we'll answer them. uh if there are complex questions we will we will unmute you and and then uh we can have a conversation as well. Um I have questions as I don't have any experience. Um if you like I said there are two parts to that answer. I already I think covered that uh Sultana you need to check if you already have some experience you need to see as we go through the knowledge areas if part of those experience can be claimed as business analysis experience that might be um one way where you might have enough experience but even then if you don't meet the eligibility criteria then obviously you cannot give the IIBAP exam uh you still if you still want to have the certification you can um look for CCBA or ECBA depending on your level of experience or if you are looking for a job as a BA you can use the simply learn um certificate and the experience and the knowledge that you gain in order to um in order to look for jobs where uh you can have an entry- level BA kind of a position uh who can be the referer uh No, it could be somebody at um somebody who have known you in a professional capacity. Uh Nikit um anybody who who has known you in a professional capacity can be a referral for you. Uh are certification uh mandatory? No certification is not mandatory. I'll take this point to talk about how I got into uh business analysis. So I I joined um long time back I think uh I joined one of the software consulting companies based out of India. I worked there as a software engineer for four and a half years. Then I did my MBA. Post MBA I joined a banking company in their operations. I was working in their operations for close to two years. And there was a project that I was supposed to support which I supported for around six months and I was using my domain knowledge to help provide requirements to the business analysts there. And then I asked the team uh they wanted to have a new BA there because I think the BA was leaving or something like that that I would like to take up that opportunity because I have the domain experience and I have a past experience in software development. And then I convinced them that they they they hired me as a BA and then that's how I got into BI. At that point I did not have a business analysis certification. I worked for a as a BA for I think almost 6 years before I took the certification. So you don't have to be certification to get into a BA job. What you need is the knowledge and skills and you need to um convince an employer that you have them in order to get into that job. Um if you have experience in QA Haris you can uh use part of that experience uh as a BA. So that's what we call as transferable skill. Um can we check if we meet um the eligibility criteria is laid out which is the 7,500 hours of experience. So you should be checking it before you paying the fee. Yeah. Uh the only thing you need to be clear is that you need to have contacts who can validate um uh you you you can val who can validate your experience because if your application is picked up for audit, they will reach out to your um your stakeholders, the contacts that you provide and they have to confirm that what you have claimed is correct. Okay? like I when I got my when I did my uh certification and my uh first reertification, I was not audited but I when I did my uh reertification in uh October, they audited me. So they reached out to my contacts and they had to respond to IIBA saying okay what BJO had claimed in his application is correct. So that you need to make sure uh no if the so you will get the simply learn certification after you complete the three criteria that we discussed at the beginning right 80% attendance uh assessment and the uh project submission once you complete these three you will get a certificate in business analysis from uh simply learn if you are doing a bigger course like for example AI for business analyst or business analyst course you will get that certificate as well right if you want the IBA certification that is when you need to pay additionally and get that certification completed uh CB doesn't have uh from sebab from sebab uh certificate from simply learn does not have any prerequisites it has post uh requirements right you you could be a fresher or you could have experience doesn't matter. What matters is you you attend you clear an a test right you you there are a few tests you need to clear uh at least one of them and you need to submit a project uh you need to submit two out of the four projects that are there at the end of the course. So once you do that you will get the certificate from CBA uh from uh you get the certificate from simply learn that you have completed the cabb training with similar that is your evidence for IABA for you to get the um uh professional uh development uh credit. Uh so nilen I am talking specifically about the sebop um course right you you might have like if you remember um uh okay let me just uh repeat so that everybody is clear uh so I think what you are referring to is Right. When you log into the SimplyLearn um learner portal, you will have a program. Right. So I think Nanjen when you log in, you see the same thing, right? This AI powered business analyst. I think that is the course that you have signed up. But each of you would have signed up for a different course, right? Some of you might have only signed up for this course certified business analysis professional. Now our focus the one which I am going to cover today and then until 21st of March is only this course. Okay. Now like nilangen if you have signed up for the AI business analyst course you have you know six other courses that you have right. So you need to complete those depending on which are mandatory which are optional and all those kind of stuff only then you will get the certificate for the entire program right which is the Microsoft ashure AI powered business analyst our focus in the next 9 days is going to be only sebap okay hopefully everybody is clear on that and I am talking about that sebap um course within the simply learn program so you could be in different programs. You could have signed up only for CBAP as well. Uh you will get this CBA course completed and a certificate for this CBA uh course from simply learn once you complete the three criteria which is 80% attendance, the assessment and the project submission. Okay, hopefully that answers all questions. We will go back to the uh the uh we'll go back to the the material. Okay. Now um IABA um once you get certified they want you to do a reertification right. The the goal of reertification is that they want to make sure that you not only get certified, you continue to develop yourself as a BA, learn uh new new things, uh you work as a BA, uh you contribute to the BA community of practice. So that is why there is a reertification program, right? So every 3 year you need to get reertifi reertified, right? The purpose is to make sure that there is ongoing professional development. Uh encourage learning uh make sure that there is certain amount of standards that is being met. Um so all those things are uh the reason why we have reertification. How do you get reertified? You you have six CDU categories. Um it's formal academic education. You can attend some course. uh what is known as professional development, professional activities, there are self-arning, you can read some books, there are some online courses that you can attend. Um there are volunteers, volunteer services, professional experience. Each of these might have limited um CDUs that you can claim. But excuse me. Essentially what you do is you um list the number of hours that you spend in the last 3 years in each of these CDU categories and it should add up to 60 CDUs and you report that to um IB and you provide um contacts you can verify that you have um completed these uh CDUs and then you pay the fee. Uh that's when you get the um IBA um reertification completed. Okay, with that we complete our very first lesson. Um thank you for your cooperation. Congratulations. What did we study? What did we learn? So IABA is the organization that sets standards for business analysts. Um it um defines what is known as the Babok. It defines the competency model. Um it also comes up with a set of certifications which will recognize your professional competence. If you have a membership with IABA, there are some benefits. If you complete CBA, there are some benefits both for you and for your organization. Uh in order to prepare for the CBAP exam, you need to be very familiar with the Babau guide. You need to review the FAQs on the IABA website. You need to go through trainings, have a mender, join a study group. We looked at how to apply for the exam. We looked at the exam eligibility criteria. We looked at the exam format, the exam blueprint, sorry, blueprint, and the reertification um process as well. So what are we going to cover in the rest of the class today? We will look at what is business analysis. We will look at a definition of business analysis. Um we will look at what does a business analyst do. We will look at the business analysis core concept model. Uh we will look at the knowledge areas. Uh we will look at the different types of requirements. We will look at requirements and designs. We will look at a list of competencies that a business analyst should have and we will we will not go through in detail. We'll just look at the techniques right there are 50 techniques. It will take us the entire course to cover all of them. So we won't go through them in detail. We will take a look at the techniques just so that we you know that there are 50 techniques. Uh we will look at the perspectives. We'll go through the perspectives briefly but not in too much of detail because again we will cover them in detail in uh in the future classes. So that's the plan for the remaining um three odd hours in our um in our session. Okay. Now one of the biggest problem that we have especially when it comes to developing and implementing software is um lack of clarity of what is it that we want to build. Right? You can see some statistics on the screen. A number of software projects are failed because the requirements are either poor, they are not clear, they were ambiguous. There is a large number of large amount of effort that is wasted because incorrect requirements were provided and they had to be corrected. lot of money is being spent um in fixing requirement errors um which which which becomes a major part of the rework that is involved in um in in software development. Now how can we fix these problems which is where you need to do business analysis with a set of standards which are defined by the business analysis body of knowledge. uh so that we have better business analyst who will then capture better requirements which means better software products are being created. Okay, we will look at the key concepts of business analysis. Who is a business analyst? Business analyst core concept model. Knowledge areas requirements classification requirements and design and who is a stakeholder. First question, what is business analysis? Okay, anybody has a view on what is business analysis? Bridge between stakeholders and tech teams. That is a good answer, Aanga. Thank you. Analyzing requirements. That's correct, Harish. Forecasting through business artifacts. Okay. bridge between business and IT. That's that's a very good definition. Uh client and software people who helped to place the client requirement. Yeah, exactly. Uh any other views? Any other answers? Okay, I think um okay. Uh I think couple of more enable change. Yes. Uh BAS are the ones who enable change, define needs to solutions. Um enhance value. Yeah. Identify business needs and recommend solutions. That's very good. Ashish. Uh business research. BS do business research. Finding the root cause of issue, find solutions for improvement. Yes. Uh business needs and providing solutions to address business problems. That's a correct um response as well. Okay. U a number of uh good responses. Uh the textbook definition I think some of you almost gave the textbook definition which is that a business analysis is the process through which you enable the change. Right? So there is a change that needs to happen. You enable that change. How do you enable that change? By defining the need and by recommending solutions that will address that need. Right? I'll repeat business analysis is when you are enabling a change by defining the needs and recommending solutions. But then the question is then what do we mean by change? What do we mean by need and what do we mean by solution? Right? We will see that in a minute. Um what do business analysts do? Business analysts perform the tasks that are described in Babau guide. They identify information. They speak with stakeholders. Um many of you said they are the bridge between business and technology. So they speak with business teams in order to understand their business problems, their aspirations, their goals. They elicit these from their business stakeholders. uh they will then somebody gave the example of root cause analysis. They might investigate a little bit further to understand what is the underlying causes of the stakeholder um dissatisfaction or the stakeholder problems and then identify what needs to be done. Right? That's what a business analyst do. Right? So they basically try and understand what is the problem that we are trying to address or what is the opportunity that we are going to uh benefit from. uh how can we what what is the reason why that problem exists? What are the the root cause of that problem? What is the root cause of that opportunity? How can we implement a change or a solution in order to um benefit from that opportunity or in order to address that problem. That is what a business analyst is. Okay. Now what we will do is we will try and go through the key terms or what is known as the business analysis core concept model so that we have a sorry I don't know why this changes uh we have a common understanding of these terms that we will use throughout the entire course for the next nine days. The first is change. Okay. The change is the act of transformation in response to a need. Okay. Let's take an example. Let's say I will use deliberately a non-technical example for um uh for everybody to understand. Right now need is a problem or an opportunity. Let's take a very non-technical example to understand what a need is. Right? I live in Bangalore. Right? If you have been to Bangalore or if you know somebody in Bangalore, they will tell you one of the biggest problems in Bangalore is traffic. Right? If you were to travel through traffic, if you were to travel through Bangalore, you are likely to get stuck in pretty bad traffic. So that is a problem, right? The problem that we have is the bad traffic in Bangalore. So we are unable to go to our office every day because it takes us 2 hours to cover 10 kilometers of distance in Bangalore. So the traffic problem is our need, right? We need to address the need. Now what are the solution? What is the solution? Solution is a one way to satisfy the need. Right? Now what are the different ways in which you can address traffic problem in Bangalore? One is we can try and improve the public transport in Bangalore. Um so we can um so they are building metro in Bangalore. So the metro lines can be a way to address the the traffic problem. Uh they can improve the bus network. uh they can uh another solution can be they can charge a congestion charge for some of the highly crowded areas in in the more central areas. Uh another solution can be they can implement uh car pooling right another solution can be the organizations in Bangalore can come together and agree that they will um they will provide more work from home options for their employees. So each of these is a different solution that can address that particular need. Right? Now let's take a one particular solution. Let's let's say we go with public transport. Right? What does that mean? Right? So today we have certain level of public transport. We need to go to a level of public transport where everybody can comfortably travel from one place to another easily comfortably without having to use their personal transport. So that requires a number of things to be put in place. So you need to have metro lines, you need to have better bus transport, you need to have last mile connectivity, you need to have places where like if it is a short distance like a kilometer, you should be able to walk. Right? That entire transformation of going from how the city is currently to how the city is to be in the future where you can essentially go anywhere either walking or through public transport is the change. It involves possibly multiple solutions. It involves adoption of the of that solution as well. Right? It is one thing to say that you know you you implement say for example a metro line but people are like okay everybody else go by metro I will continue to go by car right that is not going to solve the problem so you need to drive that awareness and that adoption as well. So that's basically change or that is the act of transformation in response to the need. Okay. Now there is three more things. The first is that we will cover is a stakeholder. Right. stakeholder is somebody who is related to the change need or the solution right so if you take again the traffic problem in Bangalore the need everybody is related to the need right the entire um public of Bangalore the the entire residents of Bangalore is related to that problem so they are the stakeholders uh solution people who build metros people who BM the BMTC which is the best operator in Bangalore uh the metro operator in Bangalore, they are all stakeholders. Uh the government, they are all stakeholders for the uh solution and for the change, right? So those are the stakeholders. Then what is context? Context is the circumstances that influence the um the decisions, the solutions. Like in the case of Bangalore, the circumstances that it is a very rapidly growing city, right? It is often called the Silicon Valley of India because of the large number of technology companies in Bangalore and they are still growing right because they are still growing often what happens is that the infrastructure is unable to keep up with the pace of growth right so when you plan for the future that context should be kept in mind right you should keep in mind that this is a rapidly growing city so if you assume that the city will grow at a very like the the the growth will stop. You cannot plan when you are planning for the infrastructure, you cannot plan for the current city. You have to plan for the city in 5 years time, right? And in 5 years time, it would be probably double or triple the size depending on what growth rate you are going to provide it, right? So that is the context. Okay? So context are context is basically the circumstance that is going to impact the change that you're going to implement. The last is the value. value is the usefulness of a change um to a stakeholder within a context. So in Bangalore it could be the ability of people to save maybe 2 hours of travel every day. Uh amount of reduction in pollution uh it could be reduction in fuel uh expenses. So number of different values can be attributed to a change. So value is the worth of a change to a stakeholder in a context. We will look at a few more examples. Uh okay so there was a question stakeholder in your example can be traveler also correct yes that's correct simma um it can be a traveler as well okay let's look at a couple of more examples so we saw the core six core principles right uh let's look at an example so there is a bank the bank wants to launch a mobile banking app change what is change is a transformation from current state which is the state to the future state. Right? What will be the change? Moving from a branchbased service to a digital mobile banking, replacing existing manual loan approvals with automated approval system. So these can be examples of change. What is need? The customers of the bank are often waiting long hours in the queue in the branches. there is high operational cost because you need to maintain the branches. Uh the competitors offer better digital services. So you are better off going to a different u bank than your current bank. Right? So these are the problems or opportunities that is motivating the change which is moving from branch-based service to a digital mobile banking. What is the solution? develop a mobile bombing application and implement an automated loan processing system. So these are solutions that you can implement. Who are the stakeholders? Customers, bank employees, IT team, compliance team, management. So these are all stakeholders for uh the mobile banking um example. What is the value? Customers will get 24 by7 banking access, reduced operational costs, faster approvals like for things like loans, better customer satisfaction. These are all the value that the change can deliver. Now, what is the context of this, right? So, banking is often very highly regulated. So, you need to be in compliance with regulatory requirements. You need to make sure that the cyber security is taken care of. uh the fintech market is very competitive. So it is um there is an opportunity cost if you do not implement the mobile application right. Uh you might have an existing core banking system. So you might need to think of ways in which you can integrate with it without which you will not be able to have the solution adopted and implemented. Okay. So that is the business analysis core concept model. We will continue to see this um in the future. Uh we will see again these six terms. Make sure that you understand them. Now we will take a look at the six knowledge area at a very high level. Okay. So the first knowledge area is called business analysis planning and monitoring. Before you do anything, you need to plan. Correct? Let's say you want to clear the CBA uh certification exam, right? What will you do? So you will create a plan. How will you create a plan? You will look at okay what are the things I need? I need um you know 7,500 hours of experience. Do I have that? Yes. Okay. I need to document this 7,500 hours. Okay. How much time is it going to take? Okay. It will take me a week. Okay. So first is to document my experience. Then I need to get um the um the PDUs the the professional development units. What do you do? I have to attend the simply learn CBA course. Okay, so let me sign up for that. The course will be from this date to this date. So that's the second uh activity. The third is okay, I need to read the Babok guide. So I'll go it will take me you know I don't know two months to read through. Okay, so I'll read it from this date to this date and then I will um review the material from simply learn which will take me this many times. So it will go from this date to this date and then I'll give some mock tests um and then I will do some revisions. So you will basically create a plan which might be let's say from 6 months from today I want to give the CBAP exam in order to make that happen I need to take these steps these are this is my plan these are the activities this is the support I need this is the money I need this is the the people whom I reach out to for mentoring or whatn not right this is what you do before you take out take over take take up any activity essentially right if you were to apply for a job what you do is okay so this is my I need get my CV ready. I need to realize what kind of job I want. Uh I need to understand what skills I want have. I need to maybe attend some sessions. So these are the kind of planning that you do before any activity. You need to do that before business analysis as well. So business analysis, planning and monitoring is the knowledge area that talks about the organization and coordination of activities that needs to happen before you do business analysis and the performance assessment that happens after you complete the business analysis. Okay. So we will see a few tasks. There are five tasks. All of them are related to uh organizing and planning for the uh the business analysis activities as well as for getting the feedback once the activity is completed. Elicitation and collaboration, right? So in business analysis, you need to get information from your stakeholders, right? It could be what is their problem, what is their need, it could be what are their goals, it could be what is what is that happening today? It could be what is it that they want to happen at the end of the change. So you need to get a lot of information from your stakeholders. So that involves certain tasks, some techniques, some um some approaches, some tools. So all those are covered under this knowledge area which is elicitation and collaboration. It also talks about how are you going to communicate the information that you collected from your stakeholders and make sure that you engage with them and on an ongoing basis. Okay, that is elicitation and collaboration. Now you collected you planned for uh your um business analysis activities. You collected some information from your stakeholders. You need to document that information. You need to make sure that when you document you document it in such a way that it is available throughout the life cycle of your project as well as the solution that you are going to build right and as long as the solution is um is being used your uh the information that you gathered should be maintained and should be uh available for people to refer to the requirement life cycle management knowledge area covers the tasks that you are going to use in order to maintain that information throughout the life cycle of the uh of the solution. Right now we we we looked at the three um business planning, monitoring, elicitation and requirement life cycle management. What you need to do is also look at the bigger picture, right? Why are you doing the change? what is the need? What is the current state? What is the future state? Um what needs to be done in order to go from your current state to future state. So that big picture strategy is being done in strategy analysis. Okay. So this is this is a set of tasks that you are going to um perform in order to understand the business need better, the business goals better, the um the the strategy that you're going to go from current state to the future state and to define the current and the future state. This will then lead you towards requirements analysis and design definition where you will then break down the business need and the business goals into more detailed requirements that can be then modeled, specified uh understood, validated and verified and then can be used by your um uh development team to convert into solutions. Uh and then finally once some sort of solution is in place you need to make sure that your solution is delivering the value it was expected to deliver. If it is not delivering the value it was expected to deliver. You need to understand why and come up with a set of recommendation in order to increase the level of value realization. Okay. I know I went through them slightly quickly but we will cover each of them in a lot of detail. um um and and and we will we will um go through them in detail in in in the future sessions but I will take a look at okay let me cover the relationships between the knowledge areas then I will uh take questions and the business analysis planning and monitoring requirement life cycle management and elicitation and collaboration are the overarching ing knowledge areas. So they are used in all of the remaining three, right? The remaining three are iterative activities that basically um kind of follows a sequence. So you start with the strategy analysis where you define the need and the business goal. Then you break down that into detailed requirements. You model specify the requirements. Then the solution is built. the solution. When the solution is built, you actually some you have some actual value that is delivered. That actual value is then evaluated in the solution evaluation that will result in further needs that will then feed to strategy analysis and then that will iterate until we have uh met the solution value that you you were expecting to meet. Elicitation and collaboration is used in strategy analysis to understand current state future state to understand the business need all those kind of stuff. In requirement analysis and design definition to go through the detailed requirements to review the the the requirement models the specifications all those kind of stuff. Uh in solution evaluation to understand how users are using their um solution. Requirement life cycle management is used to store information that is gathered from all of these three um stages. Business analysis, planning and monitoring is used to plan these activities and to get feedback once these activities are completed. Okay. So I'll take questions before we move on to the requirement classification schema. uh does context impact the solution more than the need or the solution can still the need when context is uh no you need to consider both. So the the goal of the solution is to address the need right. So you are um you are going to um your need is the traffic in Bangalore. So your solution should address the traffic in Bangalore, right? The context is that this that Bangal is a growing city. So you cannot use the context to define the solution. Bangalore is a growing city can result in a number of different solutions. That is not that is not the goal of the project. The goal of the project is to address the need. The goal of the change is to address the need. So the solution should satisfy the need but it should keep in mind the context. Right? It it is it is like saying I I'm not sure if all of you are familiar with cricket right um the goal if you are playing cricket is to score more runs than your opposing team right but you will use different approaches when you are playing a test cricket versus a one day 50 over match versus a what is called a 2020 or a T20 match. Correct. Um because that is the context, right? The kind of match is the context. But the goal is always to score the maximum number of runs without losing as many as much wickets as as you can, right? Hopefully that makes it clear. I know it's a little bit of a clumsy example. I'm not sure if all of you are familiar with cricket, but but essentially context is what you bear in mind while you are trying to address the need. context is the environment, right? Goal or need is the specific thing that you are trying to uh address. It's a problem or it's an opportunity, right? Uh like for example um um a problem can be um that you are you have an online um portal where you are trying to sell t-shirts let's say you are not able to sell enough t-shirts you people are coming to your site but they are not buying t-shirts right that's a problem right so you are trying to find out a solution to address that problem now the context is that it's an online shopping uh portal uh there is a lot of competition um and people often uh browse without making a decision. Uh conversions are generally low. So these are ex examples of the context that you need to keep in mind while you are coming up with the solution. Okay. So requirements are basically what is that you want to achieve so that a certain goal can be met. Okay. So there are different types of requirements. You have business requirements. Business requirements are the highlevel goals or highle objectives or the outcomes that you want to achieve. For example, I want to reduce the traffic in Bangalore would be a business requirement, right? I want to um reduce the uh number of people or I want to increase the number of people um using mobile application for transactions by 10%. That can be a business requirement. I want to reduce patient wait time by 10 minutes on an average. That can be a business requirement. Okay. So business requirement is the goal or the outcome that you are trying to achieve. Once you have the business requirements, you need to break that down into stakeholder requirements. Now who are your stake? We will look at what stakeholders are in later in the session. But stakeholders are basically people who are related to your uh change need or solution. So if you take the example of traffic, your stakeholders are your travelers, your um your public, uh your uh bus operators, uh the metro operator, the government. Now each of them will have different goal. What is the goal of the traveler or the uh the public? They want to travel uh comfortably uh at a cheap rate and quick, right? So that's their goal. What is the goal of a bus operator? They want to run uh an efficient and profitable business of running uh buses, right? What is the goal of metro? They want to run a uh again a profitable metro business. What is the goal of government? the government wants to provide the best services to the um people, right? So these are the stakeholder requirements. Then you have what is known as solution requirements. The solution requirements define what should the solution do. Okay, they can be two types. The first is called functional requirements. So functional requirements are basically the behaviors of the solution or the system. Non-functional requirements are what are known as the performance indicators. Okay. Behavior could be that I want to be able to walk to any place within 10 sorry within 1 kilometer from where I am in Bangalore. at any place 1 kilometer from my place I should be able to comfortably walk right so in order to achieve that stakeholder goal you need you should have all all streets should have um well-laid um sidewalks right or foot paths right that's an example uh the street should be treelaned so that you don't get uh exposed to too much of sunlight or you don't get you know hot. So these are solution requirements. Now you can have um non-functional uh requirements as well, right? The street the sidewalks should be at least 3 ft wide, right? um the um the best transport should have um uh this many number of seats or this kind of safety requirements. All buses should be um equipped with a emergency door. So these are uh not behaviors, these are performance attributes. And then finally you have transition requirement. So transition requirement is when you go from your current state to your future state. Once you are in the future state, you don't need transition requirements. So building best dep depot is an example of transition requirements. Uh building uh best uh lanes, building metro is again another example of a transition requirement. So that's basically the three types of sorry four types of requirements. business requirements, stakeholder requirements, solution requirements, which includes functional and non-functional requirements and transition requirements. Hopefully, you can see the PDF file. Um, okay. Business requirements, highlevel statements that describe the business goals, objectives, outcomes that the organization wants to achieve. Examples, if you take a patient management system, we want to reduce patient weight times by 30% within 6 months. Right? That's an example of a business requirement. Enable online appointment booking to improve patient experience. Ensure compliance with healthcare data privacy laws. HIPPA. It is an is a law I think in the United States which deals with privacy laws on in in healthare healthcare context. Right? So these are examples in a hospital management system or a patient management system um uh implementation. If you take an internet banking example increase active users by 20%. provide 24 by7 access to the banking services. Reduce call center inquiries by 40%. So these are examples of business requirements. Now let's look at the same for um stakeholder requirements, right? So stakeholder requirements are for specific stakeholders. If you take the patient management system, the receptionists need a fast way to register new patients without duplications. The doctors need access to their history. Patients wants SMS remainders for appointments. Billing clerks need an automated bill generation. So these are examples of stakeholder uh stakeholder requirements in this uh context. If you take an internet banking example, customers, the banking app should be intuitive, right? They should be able to figure out how to use it without guides and stuff like that. Bank bank tellers should be able to verify things from back end. Security officers needs audit trails so that they can treat uh they can track in case of any issues. Uh customer service representatives might want a dashboard. So these are examples of um stakeholder requirements. Now we will look at solution requirements. Um you have functional requirements in patient management system. You you are allowing patients to register through mobile app, web portal or a kiosk. You are enabling doctors to update patient health records. you automatically send appointment reminders, generate invoices. So these are all things that the system should do or the solution should do. So that is solution requirement. If you look at the non-functional requirement, the system should appro support 500 current users. The data should be encur encrypted. The system must have a certain percentage of uptime. Right? If you look at the internet banking application example, users should be able to login with multiffactor authentication. They should be providing fund transfer functionality. Realtime account balance should be there. Lock or unlock debit card or credit cards instantly. Non-functional requirements. Load within three 3 seconds. 10 minutes of inactivity should result in session timeout. 1 million daily transactions. So these are nonfunctional requirements. What are transition requirements? Examples. If you are implementing a patient management system, the hospital staff should be trained on it before 2 weeks. 2 weeks before go live. uh existing patient records which are in let's say in a book or in a paper and pen format should be moved to the new system. Um there should be some kiosks for users to self-register at the hospital lobby. Uh set up a help desk. Okay. And then um if you take the internet banking example, you need to migrate existing customer accounts uh 24 by7 customer support after six for 6 months security training for bank staff phase to launch beta users before full release. So these are examples of transition requirements. So in order to sum up um business requirements are high level goals. Stakeholder requirements are requirements for or needs of specific users. Functional requirements are system behaviors and features. Non-functional requirements are the performance and constraints of the system. Transition requirements are what you need to implement in order for you to go from your current state to your future state. But once you are in the future state they are not relevant. Yeah. So the software requirement specification will focus on um functional and non-functional requirements or the solution requirements um where you will look at the scope uh which will be for your um specific audiences uh the definitions uh the details the roles and the uh details of the solution that you are going to build. Again, it will also focus on functional requirements. So, you will either create a FSD or an SRS. You won't create both. Okay, going back to the slides. So, we have three documents. Uh you have what is known as the BRD, the business requirements document. Uh which has both business and stakeholder requirements. You have the functional specification document or the solution requirement specification which will have the actual solution requirements both functional and non-functional requirements. I'll share the sample files for you your reference. Uh we will cover this last topic and then break for uh um our short break. Um uh okay. So what are the what is the difference between requirements and designs right? So let's say you want to build a house. What do you do? You will hire an architect. And what will you tell him? You will basically tell him that I want to build a house. I need three bedrooms. I need a living room. I need a kitchen. I need a dining room. Um all my three rooms should be attached. Uh it should be only a single floor. I need a car porch where I can park my car. Um yeah, so that's my requirement, right? Uh the room should be fairly big. Uh you provide and and I want a room I want a house which is very airy. So there should be a lot of um sunlight and wind and whatnot. Right? So it should be um it should be the those are your requirements correct. So you provided the number of rooms, the size of the rooms, uh the number of bathrooms, the the other specifications that you have. What will the architect do? He will draw a plan for your home. Uh which will basically will have the number of bedrooms that you have asked for, the number of bathrooms, blah blah blah. And then he will show that. So that is the design. What you first explained to your architect is the requirement. He will draw a plan and show it to you. That is the design. You will look at and you will say okay I need some changes. Okay, you have kept it like this. I want these these these these changes. So he will make those changes. He will again show it to you. You will look at it and say okay no no no I need few more changes. and eventually you both arrive at a final design which is when you start building and uh completing the house. The same thing is applicable for your requirements and design cycle which is you first come up with the requirements. That requirements will be used to define the design. The design is then presented back to your stakeholders. They will then review it and they might say okay I know I told you this requirement but looking at your design I now think that this is what you should do. So you might tweak the design a couple of times and that is when you finally arrive at the design the and this is not when when we say design it is not a technical design this is a business design right you have a problem what is the business design that is going to solve that particular problem. uh the requirements are focused on needs and the design is focused on the solution. They are done in a recursive fin fashion. So you first create requirements, then you create design, then use the design to review the requirements and then you probably update the design, change the requirements, go through this a few cycles, finally you agree on a particular set of requirements and designs. Um so a stakeholder is like I said the formal definition is that a stakeholder is someone who is related to the change solution or need but in essence stakeholder is somebody whom are you are likely to interact with on a regular basis as part of your project or initiative or change. Uh these are the common categories of stakeholders that you will um you will uh en encounter in in any project. You can see the first so business analyst that's yourself. It's the center of the whole thing. The five stakeholders in orange on the right hand side of the slide they are internal to the project. Then you have another five stakeholders who are represented in the light blue shade on the left hand side. They are external to the project. Let's talk through what each of these are. Right? So if you look at domain so domain stands for subject matter expert. So if you are implementing a project uh in which you are implementing let's say a mobile banking application the domain is banking right so anme or a subject matter expert is someone who is an expert in banking right so domain is somebody who is expert in the business that you are trying to solve a problem for so in case of a patient management system. It is somebody who is familiar with hospital industry, right? Uh in case of uh traffic management, there could be people who are experts in traffic management. So do domain is somebody who is an expert in the business that you are trying to solve a problem for. Then you have tester. So tester is the person who will validate the solution to um make sure that it meets the criteria that has been uh requested by the stakeholders. Okay. So tester is testing right? I think somebody mentioned that they have been doing QA which is another term for testing quality assurance. We are making sure that the solution that we are going to build is having sufficient quality. They it work as per expected. So that is done by tester uh who a stakeholder within the project. Then you have operational support. Once your solution is implemented, it needs an ongoing support that is carried out by operational support. Now can anyone tell me? I'll continue the explanation but using the chat box can anyone tell me why do you think the operational support is a stakeholder in a project right okay then you have implementation theme again here stands for subject matter expert so what is implementation implementation is a tech uh is a solution implementation right so you are implementing a solution so an implementation will be somebody who is um an expert in the solution that you are implementing. So it could be a a lead developer, an engineering manager, um an engineering project manager, a lead technical BA. So they they can have different uh titles but essentially the definition is implementation of the solution. And then you have a project manager. So what does a project manager do? He is responsible for the end toend delivery of the project. So he plans, organizes, assigns um manages uh stakeholders, uh manages budget, timelines, uh scope, all those things are done by the project manager. So those are the five uh internal stakeholders for uh business analysis activity for efficiency and reliability operational support is needed. That is correct because they know the operation that is correct to validate. Right? So if you have a solution already in place, what happens is that operational support can provide you what are the most common challenges that users are facing when they are utilizing the solution. So that can be invaluable input. So operational support will have a lot of areas where they can provide a lot of inputs. Okay. Now let's move on to the uh hopefully all the internal stakeholders are clear. Excellent. So let's move on to the external stakeholders. Supplier. So supplier is somebody who is providing an input into your project. Okay. So this can be a solution supplier. So for example, let's say you decide to implement what is known as an ERP or a CRM solution. So ERP stands for uh enterprise resource planning and CRM stands for customer um customer relationship management. So ERP and CRM are um already available offtheshelf solutions that you can buy from the market. So things like uh Microsoft or Peopleoft or Oracle all provide SAP they all provide um ERP and uh ERP solutions. Let's take ERP as an example right so for those ERP solutions you need a supplier. So the supplier is your um your stakeholder who is an external party to your project. Then you have a customer. You have a customer and also an end user. What do you think is the difference between a customer and end user? What is the difference between a customer and an end user? Customers are clients. Okay. for banking customer can be a client and end user can be cashier. Yes, end user is going to use the solution. Yes, you are very much bank on uh point. So customer is the one who uses the products and services of your organization and the one who is actually um you know rewarding you most most of the times using money in sometimes in other ways but essentially they are the ones who are consuming your products and services. So if you take a bank, customers are the ones who deposits money or uh uh takes loans or perform banking transactions. The bank clients are the customers. End users can be customers. So for example, if you have an online banking solution, the customers and are the end users. But sometimes the customers may not be the end users. So if the system is being built like somebody mentioned for a cashier in the bank, the end user is the cashier not the customer. Okay? So some in some scenarios end user will be different from the customer. Who is an end user? End user like many of you said is the one person who is not the one person. End user is the one who is actually using the solution that we are going to build. Okay. So customer and end user are two other um external stakeholders. Then you have sponsor. Typically in organizations when you have a project it requires what is known as a funding. What is funding? Funding is you need to allocate a certain amount of money for the project, right? Or the initiative, right? Um that funding or budget needs to be secured by a senior individual or senior executive, right? Because they need to present the case that if you implement this online banking solution that will help the bank achieve let's say um $20 million of additional revenues in the next year. So they need to make that case and get that money. So those are the people who become sponsor. So they are the ones who are sponsoring the project. Okay. So they they support you in delivering the project. So sponsor is the one who is providing the required organizational support in the form of budget, funding, uh senior uh management decisions etc. for you to move forward with your project. The last is regulator. Now regulator is an external stakeholder who regulates the industry in which you are operating. Okay? So depending on the industry, there are a number of different regulators. So for example, if you are somebody who is involved in the US stock exchange, there is a regulator called SEC. Okay? Securities Exchange Commission. So you need to adhere to their regulatory requirements. If you do not, then you might be fined for breaching regulatory requirements. Right? If you are an airline in the US, you need to adhere to the regulatory requirements put out by FAA, Federal Aviation Agency. So if if you do not then your license could be revoked. you might be penalized. Right? So if you are going to implement a new change in a particular context, you need to make sure that you understand who is the regulator in that context and what are their regulatory requirements for the specific project that you are implementing. So that is the last stakeholder who is external stakeholder. So we have five internal stakeholders stakeholder groups and external five external stakeholder groups. users are who actually take the benefit. Yes. Okay, that's correct. Business owner is C. Yeah, it could be business owner. If you are doing some the the the if you are building the uh solution for the business owner then um it is the customer and chopper the one who actually utilizes it will be the end user. Could you please um come again on customer in this particular slide customer? So for any organization that you are doing the work for there is one set of users who are using the products and services of the organization not the specific solution that you are building not necessarily the specific solution that you are building but the products and services offered by the business. If you take the example of a hospital, customers are patients, correct? Because they are the ones who are enjoying the benefits of the health care that is provided by the hospital, right? If you take the example of um if you take the example of a of a bus operator, customers are the passengers, right? Because they are the the product that is offered by the best operator. If you are taking example of a bank, the the customers who make deposits, withdrawals, loans, credit cards, debit cards. So they are the customers because they are the ones who are consuming the um uh services and uh uh the the product and services offered by the uh the bank, right? That is the customer. Most of the time they are the ones who essentially end up paying as well. Like if you are if you are a patient in the hospital you are the one who is paying right now. The reason why that is important is end user is sometimes the customer. Like if you are using a bank uh internet application or bank mobile application, you are an end user as well in addition to being a customer. But there could be systems within a bank which are used by internal bank employees. So those bank employees are effectively the end users. They are not the customers, they are the employees but they are the end users. Okay. Uh if you take the example of ERP, uh I might buy an ERP solution from you. So I am the customer but the ERP solution is used by either my clients or my uh employees. So they are the end users. So there can be different scenarios where customers and end users can can be different. Hopefully that answers your question. Uh who had answer asked that? Uh tendu. Yeah. Okay. Sometimes end user then customer. Correct. Correct. Exactly. Sometimes both are end user and customer are the same but not always. Sometimes uh cashier could be the end user. One example and get to know all uh stakeholders internal and external. Okay, I I can I can do that. Um uh so if you take um if you imagine you are implementing a solution for patient management um system in a hospital a domain will be an expert in healthcare. No somebody who is um either a doctor or somebody who is a hospital administrator with significant amount of experience. Tester will be somebody from the technical implementation team who does the testing. Operational support will be the team that performs the support of the PMS or the patient management system once it is implemented. Implementation can be the lead developer or the lead project manager or the uh engineering manager of the technology team that is developing the patient management system solution. Project manager is the project manager who is managing the project. um supplier in some scenarios uh supplier can be uh resource supplier. So you could have uh someone like a um uh someone like a uh consultancy service who might be providing you uh people who work on building the solution. So they can be a supplier. It could be um the um the infrastructure supplier. So for example, if you use AWS, which is um the Amazon cloud platform or the Google cloud platform, they could be the suppliers. In some scenarios, there is no supplier needed because you are not uh you are building everything in house. So in this in that case, you don't need a supplier. Now customer is patients. Sponsor is a senior executive within uh the hospital uh uh organization who arranges funding and support for your project. End user is either the customer if they are registering themselves or a bank uh sorry a hospital employee who might be registering the customer or the patient on his or her behalf. um regulator. Uh you can say something like FDA, Food and Drug Administrative Agency. Um depends on the country and the uh and the setup. Not all projects have a regulator. Not all projects have all these stakeholders, but these are the ones that you need to watch out for. Hopefully that answers your question, Da. What is the difference between ERP and um CRM? Uh it's not really relevant to our our topic to be honest. Ashima uh I just took those as an example. So ERP is uh enterprise resource planning. It is used for things like internal uh like making uh procurement. So if you want to buy things, if you want to make payments, those kind of stuff. CRM is for maintaining customer relationships. So ERP is used by operations within an organization. CRM is typically used by sales and customer service. All right, but that's that's all you need to know from our scope perspective. Okay, any other questions or we will move to I am working in an insurance domain. May I request you to differentiate who are the customers? It depends on exactly what you are doing in the insurance domain. Har. So for example, let's say you make a platform where your customers can enter their details then get an instant quote. Can you tell me who is the customer in this scenario and who is the end user in this scenario? Yes. Who is the end user? Customer is basically the one who is planning to buy the policy. Who is the end user? No. No. the end user is the customer. So the basically what we are saying is that we have a platform. I am a customer or I want to be a customer of your uh insurance company. So I come to your insurance um website. I enter my age whether I smoke or not, whether I drink or not, if I have any diseases etc. Then it gives you gives me a policy code. Right? So I am the customer. I am the end user of this particular system. Right? you are basically implementing a new solution for which I am both the customer and the end user. Now imagine a slightly different scenario where you are implementing a solution for the field agents who instead of um the customers coming to them will go to the customers ask for their details enter the information and the quote will get generated for the field agent. Right? In this scenario, who is the customer? The customer is still the same, but the end user is different. The end user in this example is the field agent, right? So in some scenarios like again you need to be very clear on the exact scenario or the solution that we are talking about. It is solution specific. In the hospital example itself, when the p when you are providing a solution for the patient to register themselves, the end user and the customer are both patients. When you are creating a solution for the staff to register the patients, the customer is still the patients, but the end user is the staff. Okay. How many customers to be should be identify all the stakeholders especially the supplier in case of product Identify which one would be the supplier who would assist if PA is not able to Yeah, you would get the assistance of implementation but effectively you need to make sure that you identify all the stakeholders. So one of the things that we will cover tomorrow is stakeholder management. Plan stakeholder management. The first step in planning stakeholder management is identifying the stakeholders. So you need to identify all the stakeholders, right? The project manager can help you with that. uh the implementation or uh can can help you with that. The sponsor can also help you with that. But as a BA you should always understand who are your stakeholders and what is their role, what is their influence etc. So we will cover that in stakeholder um uh analysis and and and uh identification. uh nicate. Okay. So with that let's get into competencies. Okay. So there are um six categories of So the first is analytical thinking and problem solving skills. Second is behavioral characteristics. Third is business knowledge. Fourth is communication skills. Fifth is interaction skills. And the last is tools and technology. So we will look at each of these groups in detail. First is analytical thinking and problem solving. Okay. So this is so business analysis as the name itself suggest is an analysis activity. Now what is analysis? Analysis is your ability to break something down into smaller chunks and understand what is happening and come up with ways to solve problems. Okay. So that is a critical competency for a business analyst. Now there are a number of sub um uh skills. So you should have creative thinking. You should understand how to generate new ideas and new approaches to solve the same problem. Right? Um you should be quick to learn. Again uh you should be uh able to absorb information fairly quickly. Most of the times what happens is that uh you are put in vastly different projects. I've done quiet projects where I had initially I had no idea what about the domain that I was working on. So you will you will be expected expected to learn uh the business and the domain fairly quickly. So ability to learn is a key uh skill conceptual thinking. What is conceptual thinking? your ability to uh look at uh information that is presented to you and understand what are the first principles uh and understand what are the different concepts that are related to this particular problem and think in that those terms is conceptual thinking. So and you should be able to have that conceptual thinking. uh decision making again there is a um there is a standard way in which you make decisions which is uh we will again we will cover some of those techniques later on but effectively you will look at okay this is a problem what are the different ways in which I can solve this problem and what are the different um criteria that I will use to evaluate these options so that's kind of decision making problem solving uh visual what is visual ual thinking. You should be able to represent uh problems uh solutions, processes, everything in the form of a a visual representation so that you can communicate that easily to your stakeholders. And finally, system thinking. System thinking is there are uh different um systems or people's processes and technology that interact with each other to get things completed. You should be able to understand that interactions better and and communicate those interactions so that you understand what are the boundaries of these interactions. um as a as as a rule what I follow is that anything related to the topic at hand we will address right now but anything which is more generic let's let's keep to the end so that we don't break the flow. how can we visually represent the concepts let's take an example right I think we already discussed a patient enrollment process okay so you are working on implementing a solution for a hospital you go there and you talk to the people who does the enrollment of patients. They explain to you how they are doing it. Right now they explain to you that the patient comes to the hospital, we give them a form, they fill up the form, they come and uh they fill it up, they give it back to us, uh we enter that into the system and then create a uh uh invoice, they pay the invoice and we complete the registration. Right? So this is a process that we have understood from the staff. Now you can easily represent this in the form of a flowchart. You can represent this in the form of a uh process map. You can represent it in the form of a use case diagram. Some of these techniques we will discuss in our future sessions. But you should be able to at the very least you should be able to put it in the form of a simple flowchart. Step one, customer comes uh fills the form. Step two, uh, uh, the staff inputs information into the system. Step three, invoice is generated. Step four, the payment is done by the customer. Step five, the payment reference and the receipt and the um, and the registration ID is handed over to the customer or the patient. Right? So that's how you visually represent the concept purwa. Uh so for analytical thinking do we need to represent in the form of any tools to stakeholders in case of and the tools are not necessarily the most important thing the representation is right. So you can uh you can use something as simple as word or powerpoint or you can use more complicated tools like VCO, Figma etc. But the the story and the uh narrative that you are able to communicate with very simple diagrams is the important thing, right? the tools are are less important than what is it that you are trying to convey to your stakeholders. So if you were to explain a process to somebody, you can do that in an easily in a PowerPoint or in a word document and people will be able to completely understand that only if it is a very complex project where you have I don't know you know 200 steps right um then you need more advanced tools like VCO because you know there are so many back and forths and stuff like that which might become slightly complex for you to represent in in in some of the simpler tools but 90% of the time the process flows or the the visual representation will be simple enough to do in in simple tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. Okay, hope that answers your question. Harish the previous slide and this slide color coding is correlated to write or done by the same group to execute a project. No, that don't there is nothing to be um there is no significance to the color coding. It is just random. Okay. It it is not ethics and organization management are not um not in one group and the other three are not in another group. It is just they have used color. We have used colors just to uh make it slightly easy to look at. Okay. So the second set of characteristics is uh behavioral characteristics. So the first is ethics. Right. What is ethics? Ethics is your um ability to stick to commitments and rules. Um so basically if you say you will start a meeting at 10:00, be there at 10:00, be there at 9:55. Um if you say you will complete a document on Friday, try and complete it by Thursday. uh if you say um you know um I will uh spend some time reviewing this make sure that you spend some time reviewing this. So that is how you basically develop that work ethic and this is I think behavioral characteristics are not just for business analysis for any work that you do this is extremely critical and this will make the biggest difference than you can imagine than any uh technical skill that you have right uh your ability to uh build that relationship with your stakeholders by being trustworthy where whatever you promise them you deliver. Um you be accountable. So you say that I'm going to complete a pro uh a documentation you know in in certain amount of time. Make sure that you do that. You say I will send an update on Friday. Make sure that you send an update on Friday. make sure that so it also involves high levels of organization and time management because let's say you need to create a BRD right you need to be able to understand how much time it is going to take and then make sure that you also put in some amount of buffer for unforeseen conditions and then uh commit to it and once committed don't waver right make sure that you look at correct priority and then as a BA you will work in various different environments, right? So, you might work in work with people who wants projects to move at pace. You might work with uh teams where things are a little bit more laidback. You should be able to adjust and adapt yourself to the environment where you are uh working on. Okay. I think behavioral characteristics are fairly straightforward. Let me know if there are any questions. If not we will move to uh business knowledge. Okay. Uh business knowledge is nothing but domain knowledge. Uh you should be uh you should try and develop uh business acumen. Um you can if you if you can undergo some uh business trainings that would help. Uh so things like how what is the balance sheet, what is revenue, what is cost, what are the different business models. Um so if you can understand that that will help uh you to understand the problem that you're trying to solve better. If you have specific industry knowledge that will help as well. So for example, I have always been working in banking. I have always worked within the corporate side of banking. Right? So there is always the retail side of banking. But I work more on corporate side of banking. So because of that I'm more familiar with than that than anything else. That's industry knowledge. Someone else I know has worked her entire career in um uh aviation. So that's another industry knowledge. So having understanding of your specific industry. Somebody who might be working in e-commerce might be expert in e-commerce. So having that industry knowledge is going to help you as a BA. uh having organizational knowledge, right? Uh if you are already working in an organization, knowing how that organization works, what kind of processes, policies they follow, what management structure they follow, that can be uh useful solution knowledge. Um if you are working on a specific product, let's say you are you are not you're working in finance, right? You're working on a specific system but you are not working it in in the sense of a project or a business analyst uh activity. Yeah, you are an user of that system but you are an expert user on that system. So that can help you to understand uh business analysis activities better. Uh the last is methodology. So knowing what kind of different methodologies are being used. So we will cover agile versus um waterfall or um predictive versus adaptive as as the babog refers to it later. But having that methodology knowledge is also quite critical. Now um I think one of the common questions that I get especially on the introductory sessions is how do I with so and so experience will be able to move to so and so um in in in so- and so industry would be able to move to a business analyst role and the answer is always capitalize on your domain your business your industry and your organizational knowledge sometimes even your solution knowledge to move to a BO. Okay. The next set of um competencies are communication skills. Uh the first is verbal communication skills. It is extremely important. The biggest impact that you will make is in your interactions with your stakeholders. You should be able to get information out of them and you should be able to uh communicate ideas to them. uh non-verbal communication will help you build your uh relationship with your stakeholders which will make things like getting information getting signups etc uh much more uh easy. Listening is equally important probably even more important because most of all most of us don't know how to listen properly. So listening…

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