Agile for Business Analysts

Below are some learning resources to guide you through your Agile journey as a Business Analyst. If you are also a PMI member, you can access the ‘Transforming to Agile’ webinar series here.
If you’re interested in training, we recommend:

• Agile / Effective Requirements Gathering (for Agile and non Agile projects)
• Becoming an Effective Facilitator (one of our top sellers! learn to facilitate effective group collaboration sessions)
• Real World Agile and Scrum for Teams Jump Start (our top selling Agile course for teams starting or improving their Agile practices)
• PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) – now open to BAs and other roles with Agile experience.

Real World Effective/Agile Requirements Gathering and Release Planning

This is the presentation we offered at the IBM conference around real world techniques and best practices for effective requirements gathering and release planning. Enjoy!

IIBA Seminar – ‘What is Just Enough Documentation?’

There are lots of misconceptions around what Agile says about documentation. One is that Agile has NO Documentation! That brings a smile to a few folks and drives others (like me) crazy! If you’ve read anything about Agile, you’ll hear that what it really preaches is ‘Just In Time’ or ‘Just Enough’ documentation. So what does that mean? Why aim for ‘Just Enough’ and not ‘Perfect’ Documentation? I prepared this seminar for the Omaha IIBA group to share my real world experience and examples of what we actually use on actual projects. I thought of sharing this here with all of you too. If you want a copy of the agile workbook I demonstrated here please email me sally@agiletraining.com .

IIBA Seminar – The Agile BA Role

This seminar was presented to the IIBA Omaha group. My goal was to provide a quick overview of Agile and then dive into the role and skills needed for a BA on an Agile team and compare this role to it’s traditional implementation. Let me know if you would like me to present this or a similar topic at your organization. View the presentation below:

The Four Levels of Agile Requirements

Don’t you just love the word ‘Requirements’? It’s just so clear isn’t it – NOT! Have you ever heard your business customer say ‘I’ve already given you my requirements’ and the team then says ‘We haven’t received clear or detailed  requirements’? the other side to this is when the team tells the customer ‘You are giving us too much details, don’t tell us where the button goes on the screen, just tell us what you want’.  No wonder we have so many requirements related issues on our projects!
Read the entire blog: http://agiletraining.com/2011/08/17/the-four-levels-of-agile-requirements/#

PMI ProDev Conference – Becoming an Effective Facilitator

Did you know that many judge your effectiveness and leadership skills by how well you run your meetings? The key to a successful group session is having an effective facilitator who can organize the meeting, control it and skillfully guide the team towards achieving their goal for the session.
You may think ‘We already know how to facilitate group sessions’ but you will be surprised at the statistics and costs of how many meetings we all attend yet how little of them are actually effective in terms of reaching their goal!
This seminar is a 1 hour version of our 2 day course on facilitation that covers at a high level what is taught in the class.

Nationwide Webinar – Agile and Scrum – Comparing Agile Roles to Traditional Roles

Have you wondered how different your role would be if you were adopting Agile and Scrum methods in your organization? The goal of this seminar is to explore and contrast the Agile vs. Traditional Roles and Responsibilities in addition to outlining the new skills needed for being part of an Agile team. We will explore the following roles:

1. Sponsor vs. Product Owner
2. Project Manager vs. ScrumMaster
3. BA vs. Agile BA
4. Tester vs. Agile Tester
5. Developer vs. Agile Developer
6. Architect vs. Agile Architect
7. Resource Manager vs. Agile Resource Manager

This was presented as a nationwide webinar in September and covered the success and challenges various organizations have faced with the culture change needed for adopting these new roles.