Soft skills, sometimes referred to as “professional skills”, are the essential enablers of business analysis - independent of technical or industry specific skills and knowledge.

Soft skills are extremely valuable to any organization - and are often in short supply.

Stakeholders at every level of the organization rely on thorough, objective, accurate business analysis and the resulting business requirements and supporting business cases for decisions regarding changes in business processes and business systems.

A standardized consistently applied best-practice approach for the elicitation of requirements, the application of critical thinking to analysis and development and communication of effective business cases is essential to decision making. Unfortunately, sub-optimal decisions and missed (or misaligned) opportunities are far too frequent.

Soft Skills for business and I.T. Professionals results in better, faster business and IT decisions – with increased agility that balances the allocation of time, budget, talent and risk among alternatives and with competing opportunities and priorities.

Inteq’s Soft Skills training provides business and IT professionals with the elicitation, critical thinking, decision making, business case and communication skills, techniques and methods to engage stakeholders at all levels across the enterprise.

The concepts and content of this course is based on years of best practices gleaned from thousands of business analysis interactions across the spectrum of industries and subject matter domains across the commercial and public sectors. It’s your roadmap for developing enterprise-level professional skills.

Course outline

Introduction and Foundation

Business analysis from an enterprise 360° perspective

Defining customer and business value

Business change drivers

Agile business analysis

What is a business case?

Framework for Business Analysis

Business functions, processes and work activities

Business requirements vs. business systems requirements

Stakeholder and SME analysis

Business value drivers and constraints

The 5 essential business analysis questions

Analyzing Business Problems & Opportunities

Analysis from an agile perspective

Goals vs. strategies vs. tactics

Measurement, metrics and indicators

Gap and Root Cause Analysis | Scenario Analysis | Risk Analysis | Cost Analysis

Developing Business Cases

Business case format and components

Anchoring business cases with user stories

Iterative evolution of business cases

Validating and refining business cases

Grooming the case backlog

Presenting business cases

Eliciting Business Knowledge

Deep versus superficial analysis

Sources of business knowledge

Essential facilitation skills

Essential Professional Skills

Managing difficult personalities and situations

Teams and team building

Communication skills

Active Listening skills

Case Study | Developing a Business Case

Participants analyze a business problem, identify alternative solutions and develop a business case in connection with a real world business process decision that impacts people, systems and workflows. This case study provides an invaluable template that participants can leverage in their organization