Workshop Outline

Business Systems Analysis:
Extended Techniques

Foundational Knowledge

The workshop builds on concepts presented in either the 3 day Business Systems Analysis: Essential Techniques Workshop, or the 5 day Business Case: Planning and Analysis Workshop. Accordingly, prior attendance on either of those workshops is necessary.

Introduction

Business Systems Analysis: Dimensions of Complexity

Project management of business projects has undergone a paradigm shift. Contemporary project management has evolved to become a dynamic and flexible approach that reflects the rapid changes in technology, organizations and development approaches. thomsett INTERNATIONAL presents a radical model of project management that is driven by the need for faster delivery cycles, full business involvement and higher productivity and quality. The role of the Business Systems Analyst in defining the content of the business project is becoming more and more significant in this environment.

thomsett INTERNATIONAL has developed this workshop to extend the skill set presented in "Essential Techniques for Business Systems Analysts".

The Business Systems Analyst takes several key roles in successful project delivery:

• managing stakeholder communication about the business activity to speed the delivery cycle;
  
  
• obtaining and collating information about the current and proposed business system(s) from the stakeholders; presenting that information back to the stakeholders, to validate and confirm it; and to ensure accuracy and build stakeholder, involvement, commitment and understanding; and
  
  
• reducing uncertainty by understanding the impact of change on the many dimensions of business systems.

This workshop provides tools and techniques to use in presentation of project materials to the stakeholders, complementing the techniques for obtaining information presented in the Essential Techniques Workshop. In particular, documentation of benefits planning is detailed more fully.

Importantly, the workshop delineates the many dimensions of complexity demonstrated by modern business systems, and shows how to use these dimensions to document, understand and manage that complexity. By modeling each dimension against the stakeholders involved in the project, the detail may be tracked across the complexity and then linked to the Benefits Realisation Plan.

In addition, the workshop extends process modeling to more complex scenarios, discusses modeling of time-critical processes and explores the quality dimension to understand further requirements.

Who Should Attend

The workshop is designed for Advanced Business Analysists [see Foundational Knowledge above] undertaking Feasibility Studies, Project Proposals and Requirements Analyses for business process re-engineering, new product / service development, and modification of current services and support services.

The Workshop

Dimensions of Complexity: Further Techniques for Business Systems Analysts.

In the contemporary business world, the Business Systems Analyst is an integral part of the team that develops business proposals. In particular, the project manager relies on the Business Systems Analyst to assist in providing more detailed project objectives, system requirements, business process analysis and cost-benefit analysis.

This 3-day Extended Techniques Workshop develops and extends the set of analysis concepts and modeling tools introduced in our two Foundational Workshops at the Essential Techniques level [see above and our workshop Matrix]. The workshop provides modelling tools for mapping the impact of proposals onto all aspects of the organization, as well as adding detail to the tools for understanding and documenting project scope, objectives, quality requirements, and added value planning. The tools enable the complexity of the real world to be modeled across multiple dimensions.

These techniques and tools are integrated with the project management techniques that have been developed, adapted and applied by thomsett INTERNATIONAL in many business and IT projects.

Topics Include

• Understanding organisational impact:
• • Logical versus physical systems
  • Logical & physical: the linkage between data and process, people (eg: clients, suppliers, staff and their units)and technology
  • Dimensions of Business Systems
  
  
• Modelling complex processes:
• • Identifying and classifying Events
  • Event partitioning using the Event List
  • Deriving Sub-Systems
  • Linking sub-systems and events to the project methodology
  
  
• Modelling time-dependent behaviour:
• • State Transition Diagrams
  
  
• Quality Requirements:
• • What is quality
  • How to define the quality requirements
  • Quality agreements
  • Linking the quality requirements to the logical models
  
  
• Benefits Planning:
• • Considerations in preparation and sensitivity testing of benefit calculations
  • Scoping the benefit calculation: Net Social and Private Benefit calculations
  • Getting the numbers: Shadow Pricing and Contingent Valuation
  • Measuring benefit realization: who, what, when, where, KPIs
  • Considering the impact on the triple bottom line
  
  
• Modelling corporate and project impact:
• • Stakeholder analysis on the various dimensions, including: time, process, data, procedure, benefits and quality
  • Reducing uncertainty in understanding the impact of change on the many dimensions of business systems
  
  
• Presenting the proposal:
• • Writing it up
  • Considerations in presentation
  • Tools and techniques for presentation
  
  
• Case Study: The concepts, tools and techniques presented in this workshop will be reinforced through case study work

Documentation

Workshop participants will receive a full set of the workshop materials.

Book an In-house Workshop or a place on a Public Workshop

copyright: thomsett INTERNATIONAL 2006 | contact