Developing Analytical Competence to Manage Operations Course

It has now been established without any doubt whatsoever that lean operations and efficient systems lead directly to increased bottom line profits.

The purpose of the course is to understand what strategic Business analysis is, why it is used, and how it is used. Participants will learn what the necessary elements are that support the use of Business Analysis to include contractual agreements, technology, sponsors, risk identification and mitigation, sources of capital, financial structuring, the use of Business modeling and other considerations.

The time on the course is designed to provide participants with the tools they need to continue with their own efforts to analyze and model Business deals as they return to their workplace. This program is designed as a first course for people who would like an opportunity to practice and improve their ability to model Businesses. The course is conducted in a work shop format, with the emphasis on "learning by doing". During the program delegates work as a team to create a Business flow model from scratch.

Course Objective

At the end of the course, participants will:

• Apply best practices of the business analysis discipline
• Conduct a business-needs analysis to elicit stakeholder requirements
• Apply techniques to identify issues and opportunities
• Create effective requirements and communication plans
• Manage solution assessment and validation

Target Competencies:

• Technique Analyzing and prioritizing business needs
• Applying elicitation techniques
• Deploying root cause analysis techniques
• Writing SMART business objectives
• Conducting stakeholder analysis
• Deploying the affinity diagramming

Course Content

Module 1

Defining Business Analysis (Overview of the business analysis discipline)

• Key roles and responsibilities
• Distinguishing between business analysis and other related disciplines
• Introducing the business analysis framework
• Gathering business needs at the organizational or department levels
• Performing needs-analysis
• Choosing the best elicitation technique
• Soliciting enterprise-level contextual analysis
• Identifying the nine elicitation techniques

 Conducting Enterprise Analysis (Analyzing the business landscape)

• Categorizing and prioritizing business needs and issues using affinity diagrams
• Assessing business capabilities and gaps
• Detecting problems and finding opportunities
• Exposing root causes of problems
• Finding opportunities for growth
• Identifying elements of the initial solution scope
• Developing action-oriented business initiatives to address business needs and opportunities Measuring the feasibility of options

 Planning and Monitoring the Business Analysis Process (Planning for requirements analysis)

• Documenting assumptions, ground rules and templates
• Producing a requirements development plan to guide and manage the process
• Building the communication plan
• Performing stakeholder analysis
• Identifying key stakeholders
• Analyzing the impact stakeholders have on a project
• Developing a change management process
• Baselining your plan
• Following the defined change management process
• Managing the change control process

Module 2

Managing and Communicating Requirements (Analyzing requirements)    

• Verifying, prioritizing and organizing requirements
• Specifying the requirements document
• Identifying key relationships using traceability
• Executing the communication plan
• Addressing common pitfalls typically encountered during requirements development
• Validating the requirements document with key stakeholders
• Managing stakeholder agreement and conflict

Assessing and Validating Solutions (Allocating requirements)

• Optimizing business value
• Evaluating dependencies between requirements
• Assessing organizational readiness
• Identifying organizational capability gaps
• Defining business and technical organizational impacts
• Building the Business Process Improvement (BPI) Framework
• Defining BPI
• Business process improvement vs. re-engineering
• BPI as a driving innovator in organizations
• Uncovering BPI challenges
• Analyzing your personal BPI skills
• Assessing BPI in your organization

Identifying Key Business Drivers

• Developing business requirements
• Analyzing the needs of key stakeholders
• Defining the four key requirements
• Deploying enterprise analysis tools
• Identifying influences on the business
• MOST
• Five forces
• PESTLE
• SWOT
• Designing appropriate measurements
• Linking business drivers to measurements
• Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Outlining the "As-Is Process" (Applying principles of business process modeling)

Module3

Managing and Communicating Requirements (Analyzing requirements)

• Verifying, prioritizing and organizing requirements
• Specifying the requirements document
• Identifying key relationships using traceability
• Executing the communication plan
• Addressing common pitfalls typically encountered during requirements development
• Validating the requirements document with key stakeholders
• Managing stakeholder agreement and conflict

Assessing and Validating Solutions (Allocating requirements)

• Optimizing business value
• Evaluating dependencies between requirements
• Assessing organizational readiness
• Identifying organizational capability gaps
• Defining business and technical organizational impacts
• Building the Business Process Improvement (BPI) Framework
• Defining BPI
• Business process improvement vs. re-engineering
• BPI as a driving innovator in organizations
• Uncovering BPI challenges
• Analyzing your personal BPI skills
• Assessing BPI in your organization

Discovering Process Improvements (Relating process measures to business drivers)

• Analyzing process performance
• Linking processes to your business
• Recognizing the causes of poor process performance
• Time
• Cost      
• Quality
• Satisfaction
• Leveraging problem analysis criteria
• People
• Technology
• Business rules
• Materials
• Investigating root cause using mind mapping tools
• Relating root cause analysis to your own process

Module 4 

 Selling and Implementing the Solution (Maximizing stakeholder buy-in)

• Targeting key stakeholders
• Identifying stakeholder communication styles
• Differentiating approach based on project phase
• Driving change in organizations
• Determining barriers to change
• Identifying positive and negative forces for change
• Developing a force field analysis approach
• Applying force field analysis to your organization
• Facilitating acceptance in your organization
• Determining organizational necessities
• Communicating the innovation effectively
• Preparing the implementation plan

Integrating BPI into Your Organization (Assessing your BPI approach)

• Recognizing the history of continuous improvement
• Shadow pyramid
• Six Sigma
• TQM
• Implementing principles of continuous improvement
• Changing organizational behavior
• Appraising BPI processes in organizations
• Prioritizing changes using the Ease/Impact Matrix
• Applying the BPI framework
• Detailing the BPI implementation plan
• Returning to work with a plan of action