Dispatches from the WCBA Conference: Jogging through the IIBA® BABOK®

Adrian M. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:55:00 GMT

Here’s a dispatch from the first day at the World Congress for Business Analysts (WCBA).

I attended an all-day workshop titled “Get the Right Stuff, Fast: Jogging through the IIBA® BABOK® with the Requirements Roadmap” lead by Mary Gorman of EBG Consulting.

Mary is a Certified Business Analysis Professional™ (CBAP®) and works as Senior Associated for EBG Consulting, assisting teams to build the right products through exploring and confirming their requirements.

If Mary’s sessions was a jog, then this blog post will be a sprint – a very fast one, I might add!

The focus of the workshop was to:

Leverage the Requirements Roadmap to articulate requirements
Align requirements models to knowledge areas in the BABOK®
Create a set of interconnected requirements models to speed up the requirements development and successfully engage business users and customers.

During the session, Mary provided great insights on the business of “business analysis” specifically focusing on defining the scope of and modeling user requirements using the requirements roadmap:

You can get the PDF version of the requirements roadmap from EBG’s website.

During the session we raced (ok, just jogged) through the roadmap with pointers to sections in the various BABOK® knowledge areas:

Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring
Enterprise Analysis
Elicitation
Solution Assessment and Validation
Requirements Analysis
Requirements Management and Communication

Regardless of what methodology or techniques you use, Mary pointed out that it is important understand that we need to have a balanced perspective of the requirements through the lens of four fundamental model views:

Behavior: e.g. process, action, function, task, script
Structure: e.g. information, data, object
Dynamics: e.g. time, lifecycles
Control: e.g. business rules

The session slide included a nice Vann diagram of the four models with the control model being at the intersection of the behavior, structure, and dynamics models.

Jogging along… the session covered a number of techniques, including:

Stakeholder & Actors: Customer vs. User vs. Others => Ask: “Who?”

Glossary & Data Model: The building blocks for later constructs such as business rules => Ask: “What?”

Event-Response Tables: An effective tool to elicit user requirements => Ask: ”When?”

Use Case & Scenarios: Describe the flow of the actor-system interactions => Ask: “How?”

Business Policies & Business Rules: Statements that constrain some aspect of the business => Ask: “Why?”

The practical side of the workshop was the case study which forced everyone to roll-out their sleeves and put in practice the techniques discussed.

It was a cozy sessions with many chances for everybody to participate. Most of the session attendees got a free copy of the Software Requirements Memory Jogger.

- Adrian

Adrian Marchis
Publisher, ModernAnalyst.com

Business Analyst Community & Resources | Modern Analyst

Dispatches from the WCBA Conference: Jogging through the IIBA® BABOK®