Scope Your Area of Analysis
Course Length: 1 day
DESCRIPTION
Scoping is the process of defining the boundaries of a product, program, project, or iteration. Depending on your viewpoint and your involvement in the project, the components within the scope you’re analyzing may be slightly different; i.e. budget, time, resource, quality or features and functions; or stakeholders, interfaces, data flows, and processes. For purposes of this class, the viewpoint considered is from the business analysis scope perspective to identify the stakeholders (external agents or actors), interfaces, data flows, and high-level processes of concern in order to effectively determine the area for which analysis needs to be performed.
This course covers scoping techniques and best practices to ensure that you are eliciting and analyzing the right requirements based on the problem statement and that you have a framework for staying within the boundaries of the project. It also provides a technique to facilitate enough analysis so that requirements aren’t missed, but aren’t overdone either. The scope diagram provides a baseline and a primary reference for measuring all future project changes and project performance.
TARGET AUDIENCE
This course is designed for individuals of any discipline who are performing scoping activities; business analysts, project managers, business systems analysts, product managers, product owners, system architect, process engineers, requirements engineers, or any other project team member.
PREREQUISITES
None
COURSE OUTLINE
INTRODUCTION
- Define solution scope and explain its applicability and purpose
- Differentiate between solution scope and project scope
- Identify the components of scope and explain the purpose of a business requirements document
- Describe the value of scoping your area of analysis
DEFINE PROJECT CONTEXT AND PURPOSE
- Survey the Project
- Explain how to assess a project within the larger context of the enterprise
- Identify the documents and information valuable to establishing project context
- Define Project Purpose
- Differentiate business drivers from problem solutions
- Study problems and opportunities in the organization
- Clearly state business objectives
- Define project approach
- Compose a well-defined problem statement
- Construct a project glossary and illustrate its value
DEPICT OTHER KEY SCOPE PARAMETERS
- Distinguish and express key scope parameters and explain their importance
- Risks
- Assumptions
- Constraints
- Dependencies
- Plan for detailed scope elicitation
SCOPE YOUR AREA OF ANALYSIS
- Express scope with graphical representation (Context Data Flow Diagram)
- Illustrate components of graphical scope & order of definition
- Identify external agents
- Analyze and identify data flows
- Distinguish project boundary
- Formulate purpose-driven name
- Illustrate components of graphical scope & order of definition
- Complete scope with text representation
- Detect stakeholders from scope context
- Analyze scope parameters for impacts on analysis planning
FINALIZING SCOPE
- Evaluate and prepare scoping results
- Indicate newly identified project information
- Identify important actions performing a final quality check
- Produce formal context DFD (scope diagram)
- Validate Scope with Stakeholders
- Explain process of validating your area of analysis
- Describe considerations when planning communications about scope and impacts
- Explain the importance and describe an approach to gaining stakeholder agreement on scope
- Baseline the scope
- Define a baseline
- Describe the value and purpose of baselining the results of the scoping effort
- Describe next steps for business analysis after scoping
- Identify the transition to requirements management
- identify options for requirements analysis and elicitation
- Explain how scope is used throughout the project
COURSE SUMMARY
- Bringing it all together
- Develop an Action Plan with next steps, based on the student’s current project