Detailed Course Outline
The Value of "Soft Skills" for Business Analysis
Why soft skills are important in business analysis
- Identifying soft skills for solution development
- Recognising your soft skills challenges
Introducing the BA Interaction Model
- Creating the business analysis context
- The product/solution development life cycle
Aligning soft skills competencies to elicitation
- Collaboration
- Facilitation
- Active listening
- Communication
- Conflict resolution
- Negotiation
Communicating the Business Need: Making Presentations
Deploying strategic collaboration techniques
- Collaborating with high level stakeholders
- Communicating the business need
Presenting to the organisation
- Gaining buy–in: formal presentation techniques
- Selling strategies: the value of the elevator pitch
Developing Dynamic Elicitation Skills
Eliciting requirements
- Facing key stakeholder elicitation challenges
- Establishing a collaborative environment through questioning
Creating dynamic questioning strategies
- Reviewing different question types
- Generating dynamic questions with an innovative questioning model
Working with nonverbal communication
- Developing active listening strategies
- Visualising and prototyping to achieve clarity
Elicitation strategies for requirements workshops
- Building value through iterative elicitation
- Discussing the design/define dilemma
- Creating focus for prototyping with SCAMPER
Facilitating Meetings
Develop the skills to become a "Complete Facilitator"
- Defining the characteristics of effective facilitators
- Improving interpersonal and observational skills
Creating an assertive facilitation climate
- Presenting the meeting agenda
- Designing meeting ground rules
- Opening and documenting the meeting
- Questioning techniques to guide youraudience
- Pros and cons of listening techniques
- Closing the meeting
Advanced Facilitation Strategies and Techniques
Building consensus
- Techniques for bringing an audience to consensus
- When consensus can fail
- Handling disagreements and mitigation techniques
Handling behaviours
- Dealing with difficult people and group disfunction
- Conflict resolution strategies
- Creating a remediation plan
Negotiating and Communicating Issues
Principles of negotiation
- Best practices for effective negotiation
- Techniques for sharing information
- Ranking and ordering priorities
- Building acceptance criteria
Uncovering and communicating issues
- Developing a process for issue management
- Capturing and vetting stakeholder issues
- Preframing issues to the project team
- Enabling informed stakeholder decision making
Visualisation Strategies to Enhance Communication
Visualisation techniques
- Utilising user stories to clarify requirements
- Telling stories with graphs and charts
- Brainstorming with mind maps
- Identifying process issues with models
Applying soft skills for influence and leadership
- Identifying key course takeaways for immediate implementation
- Building your personal action plan