Agile Fundamentals for BAs and Product Owners

Delivery Method

Classroom and virtual (although classroom is recommended wherever feasible).

This course is not available in our public schedule but is available for on-site delivery.

Our virtual classroom training courses are delivered via Zoom.

Course Tutors

Our course tutors are practising business change professionals who have been using and teaching Agile methods for over 5 years.

Suitable for

Business analysts who are moving into an agile environment and anyone taking on the role of Product Owner in an agile project environment. Existing agile business analysts may also benefit from techniques learnt during the course. This course does not include an exam which means that the focus of training is entirely on practical application in the workplace.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course the attendee will be able to:

• Integrate into an agile project or team environment with an understanding of their role, key responsibilities and interactions with fellow project members
• Understand the principles of agile and Scrum
• Work with stakeholders to define the Product Vision
• Apply principles of 80:20 and end-to-end thinking to deliver early business value and ‘right first time’ solutions
• Work with stakeholders to gather and document epics, user stories/features and acceptance criteria
• Define the MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
• Prioritise and manage the product backlog
• Perform sprint planning
• Understand the use of, and contribute to retrospectives
• Build relationships with stakeholders to develop optimal solutions
• Confidently present findings to organisational stakeholders and their project team
• Adopt an agile mindset
• Perform effectively as an agile business analyst

Those wanting to achieve a recognised accreditation should consider BCS Requirements Engineering.

Course content

Attendees will identify and document epics, user stories or features and build an understanding of the challenges faced in matching business priorities with technical capabilities.

Attendees will understand how to form and manage a product backlog by working with technical and business stakeholders. They will see how business value is delivered through a series of sprints. The focus of the training is on taking an organisational view to delivering value through the development and enhancement of IT solutions.

The course is run in the style of an agile project during which the delegates will attend daily stand-ups, produce a product vision and user stories, perform poker planning and engage with other stakeholders. A simple case study is used throughout the course enabling attendees to experience the lifecycle of an agile project.

Course delegates will learn how to develop a product backlog starting with epics and transforming these into user stories.

On-site clients may choose to tailor the content to suit their own requirements for example, by adding contrasts with more formal approaches that may also be applied in some projects,

The training is broken down as follows:

Section 1 Agile development – the role of the product owner and business analyst

The first section of the course introduces the roles of product owner and business analyst and positions their place within an agile project. The following specific topics are covered:

• Agile project roles – scrum master, business analyst, product owner, project sponsor, end-user, developer, tester, UX designer
• The Agile Manifesto
• Agile principles
• Agile methods – An overview of Scrum and XP to assist attendees in understanding how development work is likely to be taking place.
• Comparison of agile with other project lifecycles

Section 2 Starting an agile project

The second section of the course starts to explore the principles of agile in more depth. In particular, it attempts to create an agile mindset, introduces important terminology and techniques used, and starts to produce agile deliverables. The following specific topics are covered:

• Introducing the daily scrum
• Understanding the project vision and objectives
• Creating User Roles and Personas
• Identifying product features
• Writing user stories
• Creating the product backlog
• Estimating features using planning poker
• Prioritising features – based on business value, functional and architectural risk
• Estimating the project size
• Defining the release and sprint schedule
• Drawing a burn-up chart
• Software tools (e.g. JIRA) that support agile development

Section 3 Moving through the sprints

The third section of the course starts to develop of a view of the activities once sprints get underway and functionality starts to be delivered. It looks at the activities that take place at the end of a sprint. The following specific topics are covered:

• Getting the development team started on something
• Product Owner and Business Analyst activity during sprints
• Options engineering
• Feature splitting (splitting epics into stories)
• Technical debt
• Architectural spikes
• Writing acceptance criteria and tests
• Mock-ups/Prototyping
• Sprint retrospectives
• Supporting business implementation – hints and tips to ensure that business value is maximised

Additional course information

The recommended duration is 3 days, but clients may choose to extend or reduce this to suit their own needs.

Course timings depend on the client’s individual needs but are recommended to run from 09:00 to 17:00 each day.