Advanced Business Analysis (35 IIBA® PDUs)

Define the future state, analyze the current state, assess risks, and define the change strategy to guide enterprise transformation. Focus on needs, stakeholders, value, and enterprise context.

Explore the business model canvas, a nine-building-block framework to map partnerships, activities, resources, value proposition, segments, channels, costs, and revenues. Use it for diagnosis and planning, noting its limitations.

Apply SWOT analysis to identify internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. Collaborate with stakeholders to brainstorm, document the blocks, and derive strategies that leverage strengths and opportunities.

Define a business process and master four steps—identify scope, gaps, root causes, and options—while applying Sipoc, Igoe, value stream mapping, token, and arity.

Benchmark against best-in-class practices to identify gaps and drive a project proposal to implement them. Analyze market data to identify customer needs and opportunities, trends, and inform strategic decisions.

Explore real-life benchmarking using weighted features, screening rules, and public reviews to rank vendors, then compare government spending trends and employee engagement metrics.

Document analysis is a versatile business analysis technique that gathers background from existing documents at any stage through preparation, analysis, and recording findings into a usable work product for validation.

Explore how business capabilities map to enterprise architecture using capability cards on a capability map to define what the business can do, link KPIs, and ensure business ownership.

Define the future state by outlining the post-change architecture, aligning goals, objectives, and measurements with smart criteria, and assessing needed capabilities, technology, and resources for sustained value.

Learn how metrics and KPIs translate indicators into measurable progress toward strategic goals. Explore indicator quality, data collection, and reporting to align stakeholders and drive performance.

Explore how reward systems shape KPI design across medicine, the military, and academia, revealing incentives that cause unintended outcomes. Model the future and align KPIs with strategy.

Apply the balanced scorecard to translate financial goals into four perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth. Align objectives with metrics and KPIs to steer strategy.

Develop a business case to justify change by assessing needs, determining outcomes, evaluating options, and analyzing risks and costs, then recommend a solution for executive sign-off.

Identify risks with a registry, assess probability and impact, rate them on a risk matrix, and determine treatments—accept, reduce probability or impact, pursue opportunities, or avoid changes—guided by risk tolerance.

Explore real life risk assessment through a UK health and safety workflow, identifying hazards, assessing likelihood and impact, applying controls, and recording the findings with a risk registry.

Define change strategy by comparing current and future state architectures to identify gaps, assess risks, measure enterprise readiness, and develop multiple, comparable plans focused on value realization and aligned objectives.

Assess vendors to support change initiatives by evaluating knowledge, pricing models, market position, terms, and experience, using a formal tender process to compare options transparently.

Explore elicitation and collaboration to turn stakeholder information into attributes such as needs, requirements, designs, risks, or assumptions, by preparing, conducting, confirming, and communicating results through the project life cycle.

Prepare for elicitation by planning scope, selecting methods, and coordinating logistics to align stakeholders, gather needed data, and define the session goals and outcomes.

Engage stakeholders in collaborative, research, and experiment elicitation to uncover requirements, clarify needs, and identify risks, dependencies, and constraints.

Master the interview technique to elicit business analysis information from stakeholders through structured or unstructured conversations; plan with an interview guide, balance open-ended and closed-ended questions, and manage follow-up.

Explore how to design and use an interview guide template to guide sessions, capture notes, manage consent, time sections, and gather insights from prototypes for a prospective student portal.

Engage in focus groups as structured qualitative research with diverse, pre-qualified participants guided by a skilled moderator to discuss a topic, ensure psychological safety, and generate insights.

Collaborative games use structured role playing to align understanding, guiding a four-step process: design the game, explain the rules, run the session, collect ideas and replay them to prioritize insights.

Brainstorming fosters creative thinking about a problem, generating many ideas for analysis. Prepare with a defined area, set a time limit, designate a facilitator and participants, and establish evaluation criteria.

Workshops are facilitated sessions where stakeholders collaborate to achieve a defined goal, guided by the facilitator's agenda and rules, delivering a concrete work product and post-workshop actions.

Use mind mapping to place the central topic at the center and extend branches into topics and subtopics, using keywords, colors, annotations, and images to organize elicitation and collaboration knowledge.

Explore decision modelling to guide simple and complex decisions with decision tables, trees, and decision requirements diagrams that capture inputs, data, and rules.

Convert elicitation notes into a digital, accessible format and perform an initial sense check against sources and other results to confirm accuracy before distribution.

Communicate business analysis information by engaging stakeholders in bidirectional, ongoing delivery; determine recipients, content, purpose, and format to ensure timely, usable information.

Learn how to manage stakeholder collaboration by securing commitments, monitoring engagement, and enabling collaborative, bidirectional communication to deliver change and keep stakeholders engaged throughout the project.

Explore requirements analysis and design definition to structure, model, verify, and validate requirements. Identify solution options and estimate value between strategic analysis and implementation.

clarifies how to specify and model requirements and designs, distinguishing needs from solutions, using multiple models for diverse audiences to communicate, analyze, and manage requirements.

Develop and prioritize user stories to capture stakeholder needs, link them to a product backlog, and guide iterative delivery using acceptance criteria and story maps.

Explore how use cases and scenarios describe interactions between actors and a solution, detailing use case diagrams, flows, alternatives, and the benefits and limitations of this approach.

demonstrates a real use case from an old specification, showing user and system actors, preconditions, a five-step main success scenario, errors, alternatives, and IDs, with interaction and sequence diagrams.

Model processes in business analysis with a standardized graphical approach that aligns stakeholder views and system steps. Compare notations like value stream mapping, data flows, flowcharts, UML, BPMN, and EPC.

Prototype to elicit and validate stakeholder needs, test ideas, and refine design options, using throwaway and evolutionary prototypes, wireframes, proof of concept, and storyboard to gather early feedback.

apply functional decomposition to break complex systems into smaller parts, enabling static modeling of objects and relationships (generalization, association, aggregation) for clearer structure and analysis.

Model system interactions with sequence diagrams and interface analysis, detailing exposed interfaces, messages, time spans, and API considerations for effective stakeholder communication.

Explore a real sequence diagram and interface analysis for a loyalty card payment, detailing user, internal system, and external provider interactions, user interface changes, and three failure messages.

Define the scope by using a visual box to classify items as in or out of scope, run workshops to align stakeholders, and explore parent-child, responsibility, supplier-consumer, and cause-effect relations.

Explore non-functional requirements as quality attributes that constrain functional outcomes, covering availability, compatibility, performance, security, usability, localization, and more. Learn to craft measurable, actionable targets and navigate trade-offs and negotiations.

Define a roles and permissions matrix to establish security and control access with manager and operator roles. Assign roles to users to improve scalability, audit logs, and checks and balances.

Verify and validate requirements and designs by applying quality checks against templates and standards to ensure atomic, complete, consistent, concise, unambiguous, and testable artifacts aligned with stakeholder needs and value.

A data model captures entities, attributes, and relationships to organize data for analysis. It spans conceptual, logical, and physical levels, using normalization and primary and foreign keys to connect data.

Define design options by comparing purchase, create, and hybrid approaches to meet requirements; align with change strategy, allocate requirements to technology, operations, and governance, and document options with processes.

Define design options, assess potential value, expected benefits, and costs, and establish decision criteria to guide recommendations, including a do-nothing option.

Master financial analysis by comparing costs and benefits, including capex, opex, total cost of ownership, and time to value, while considering both financial and non-financial benefits.

analyze a 2500 investment with a 3000 return using roi, present value, and net present value. compare roi, discount rate, and irr to select the most beneficial project among options.

Explore the difference between acceptance criteria and evaluation criteria, and learn how to define, measure, and apply them to single versus multiple solution choices, including cost, performance, usability, and scalability.

Master traceability to track the relationships from stakeholder needs through requirements and designs to solution components, tests, verifications, and deployments, enabling coverage, impact assessment, and informed change management.

Maintain requirements and designs by applying traceability to assess impact and update requirements, attributes, and relationships after changes, while conducting reviews to keep them accurate, accessible to stakeholders, and reusable.

Learn to prioritize requirements by aligning stakeholders and ranking by benefits, penalties, cost, risk, time sensitivity, and dependencies to create an ordered, logical backlog.

Explore prioritization techniques like grouping, ranking, story map, timeboxing, and ice, to facilitate stakeholder decisions, rank and release features, and balance constraints with bias mitigation.

Master backlog management by prioritizing and ranking items, estimating effort against capacity, and continuously adding, removing, or reordering work to align with stakeholder needs and clear delivery timelines.

Learn how Jira manages backlogs with roadmap view, backlog view, and board view; organize work into epics and stories, plan releases and sprints, estimate with story points, and track velocity.

Explore how to assess and manage requirements changes in both predictive and adaptive project paradigms, using impact analysis, traceability, and formal or informal change decisions.

Explore item tracking with dred log (decisions, risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies) to capture and resolve project concerns from recording to closure.

Establish baselined requirements and designs through a formal approval process, clarify roles, facilitate consensus, resolve conflicts, escalate when needed, and track approved artifacts and changes.

Evaluate the delivered solution by measuring performance, analyzing measures, and identifying internal and external limitations, then recommend actions to maximize value as you move from potential to actual solution.

Learn root cause analysis to identify underlying causes with an iterative framework for reactive and proactive analysis. Map causes, drill into front-end, back-end, network, factors, and brainstorm corrective actions.

Explore real-world root cause analysis cases, using fishbone diagrams and iterative analysis to identify equipment downtime and software failures, and implement systemic, preventive solutions.

Explore data mining to uncover patterns and insights, using supervised or unsupervised approaches, with descriptive, diagnostic, or predictive aims, then prepare data, model, and deploy results for decision making.

Identify internal blockers to value by assessing dependencies and problems within the implemented solution. Prioritize fixes through impact assessment and performance analysis to realize the expected value.

Assess enterprise limitations by analyzing external factors that restrict value realization across culture, stakeholders, organization, and operations, and evaluate inputs, outputs, performance gaps, risks, and technology.

Recommend actions to increase solution value by identifying performance and enterprise limitations and choosing strategies such as do nothing, add capabilities, reduce waste, eliminate redundancy, simplify, or retire.

Use lessons learned as a flexible retrospective to review deliverables, performance, technology, and process impact; identify root causes, capture action items, and foster psychological safety for continuous improvement.

Plan business analysis approach, stakeholder engagement plan, governance plan, information management, and identify performance improvements, aligning with project delivery and stakeholder needs.

Learn how a well-managed glossary aligns stakeholder terminology, reduces miscommunication, and supports governance and planning by defining domain-specific terms, providing clear definitions, and establishing access and editing processes.

Analyze stakeholders and plan engagement to identify roles, attitudes, and decision-making authority, then tailor communication and collaboration strategies for sustained change.

Master stakeholder analysis using lists, maps, and personas, then apply a stakeholder matrix, onion diagram, and raci to tailor engagement and communication strategies.

Explore organizational modeling to map formal relationships, design current and future structures, and analyze matrix, regional, and cross-functional hierarchies for effective stakeholder collaboration.

Define and design governance for business analysis by establishing decision making, change control, prioritization, and approval processes, with stakeholder roles, escalation paths, change requests, and standard changes.

Plan business analysis information management by defining how information is stored, accessed, organized, and reused, including access rights and metadata, to produce the information management approach in alignment with policies.

Identify business analysis performance improvements by measuring efficiency, effectiveness, and stakeholder feedback. Define success criteria, monitor artifacts, collect measures, and drive preventative, corrective, and improvement actions.

Master observation and job shadowing to elicit requirements and drive performance improvements by watching work on site or in a lab, using active and passive approaches.

Explore soft skills and human competencies essential to business analysis, including tools and technologies, business knowledge, communication and interaction, behavioral characteristics, and critical thinking for effective problem solving.

Develop behavioral characteristics and analytical thinking to guide ethical, fair, and accountable business analysis. Learn to apply design thinking and decision-making frameworks to enable collaborative problem solving and deliver value.

Master the five-day design sprint, a problem-solving method that maps problems, sketches solutions, builds prototypes, and tests them with experts and customers.

Develop your business knowledge across industry, market, organization, solution, and methodology, and sharpen communication and interaction skills, including active listening, facilitation, and teaching, as a business analyst.

Adopt an agile mindset to deliver value through adaptive planning and iterative delivery. Maintain a rolling wave plan, a dynamic backlog, and stakeholder feedback to guide evolving solutions.

Explore how the business intelligence perspective creates a single point of truth by transforming data and ensuring quality, delivering dashboards, reports, ad hoc queries, and smart alerts.

Explore the information technology perspective in business analysis, detailing why information technology changes occur, the information technology project landscape, stakeholder roles, governance, and typical information technology deliverables that drive value.

Explore how business architecture maps the enterprise with blueprints, aligns stakeholders and strategic objectives, and uses separation of concerns to reveal interactions, gaps, and transition paths for change.

Explore the bpm life cycle from design and gap analysis to modeling, execution, simulation, and monitoring, aiming to improve operational performance, reduce risks and costs, and increase transparency.

Explore how business analysis aligns with agility to adapt to uncertainty, deliver iterative value, and design a customer-centered end-to-end experience with cross-functional, self-organizing teams.