• Apply soft skills to increase your effectiveness as a business analyst
• Elicit clear stakeholder requirements with ease
• Present to high level stakeholders to gain buy-in
• Apply visualisation strategies to facilitate critical thinking

The Value of “Soft Skills” for Business Analysis

Why soft skills are important in business analysis

• Identifying soft skills for solution development
• Recognising your soft skills challenges

Introducing the BA Interaction Model

• Creating the business analysis context
• The product/solution development life cycle

Aligning soft skills competencies to elicitation

• Collaboration
• Facilitation
• Active listening
• Communication
• Conflict resolution
• Negotiation

Communicating the Business Need: Making Presentations

Deploying strategic collaboration techniques

• Collaborating with high level stakeholders
• Communicating the business need

Presenting to the organisation

• Gaining buy–in: formal presentation techniques
• Selling strategies: the value of the elevator pitch

Developing Dynamic Elicitation Skills

Eliciting requirements

• Facing key stakeholder elicitation challenges
• Establishing a collaborative environment through questioning

Creating dynamic questioning strategies

• Reviewing different question types
• Generating dynamic questions with an innovative questioning model

Working with nonverbal communication

• Developing active listening strategies
• Visualising and prototyping to achieve clarity

Elicitation strategies for requirements workshops

• Building value through iterative elicitation
• Discussing the design/define dilemma
• Creating focus for prototyping with SCAMPER

Facilitating Meetings

Develop the skills to become a “Complete Facilitator”

• Defining the characteristics of effective facilitators
• Improving interpersonal and observational skills

Creating an assertive facilitation climate

• Presenting the meeting agenda
• Designing meeting ground rules
• Opening and documenting the meeting
• Questioning techniques to guide youraudience
• Pros and cons of listening techniques
• Closing the meeting

Advanced Facilitation Strategies and Techniques

Building consensus

• Techniques for bringing an audience to consensus
• When consensus can fail
• Handling disagreements and mitigation techniques

Handling behaviours

• Dealing with difficult people and group disfunction
• Conflict resolution strategies
• Creating a remediation plan

Negotiating and Communicating Issues

Principles of negotiation

• Best practices for effective negotiation
• Techniques for sharing information
• Ranking and ordering priorities
• Building acceptance criteria

Uncovering and communicating issues

• Developing a process for issue management
• Capturing and vetting stakeholder issues
• Preframing issues to the project team
• Enabling informed stakeholder decision making

Visualisation Strategies to Enhance Communication

Visualisation techniques

• Utilising user stories to clarify requirements
• Telling stories with graphs and charts
• Brainstorming with mind maps
• Identifying process issues with models

Applying soft skills for influence and leadership

• Identifying key course takeaways for immediate implementation
• Building your personal action plan

Experience at the level of:

• Introduction to Business Intelligence: Designing a Successful BI Programme (BIDSP), or
• BCS Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis