Business analysts developing their careers, must work to gain the essential theoretical foundation and hands-on practice, especially since many who choose this career path come from different industries and lack experience in this field.
Even their more seasoned peers have to constantly invest effort into honing their skills and adopting new tools and techniques to stay relevant in their profession.
Of course, there are different ways to enhance your skills and expand your knowledge.
Besides formal education, a great way to expand your BA expertise and advance your career is to go through one of the business analysis training programs.
We will take a closer look at BA Blocks
, one of the premium programs of this kind, offering project-based training and courses for business analysis practitioners at various levels of experience and competency.
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BA Blocks – Program Overview
What sets BA Blocks apart from many other learning platforms is their hands-on approach. The platform offers instructor-led courses where students get a chance to shadow and work with experienced BA practitioners on projects similar to those they will encounter in their real-life practice. This way, you can master a wide range of essential BA techniques and practical tools.
By participating in a learning experience that goes beyond the classroom and working on realistic scenarios, attendees will fortify their theoretical BA knowledge, and also develop an extensive toolkit that they can use in the actual BA situations.
Depending on the course they take, students will gain access to knowledge suitable for their current level of expertise.
By opting for beginner courses, they can learn about the basics of business analysis, such as stakeholder analysis, requirements, and specifications, and understand how their work can bridge the gap between business needs and technological solutions.
More advanced courses deal with more complex BA concepts such as business process modelling, requirements elicitation and elaboration, data modelling, or execution frameworks.
The program is fully aligned with the best BA practices, meaning that it follows industry standards and takes students through three transformation initiative phases – pre-project, project, and post-project-stage.
This provides an opportunity to cover business analysis activities end-to-end, covering the full cycle of change initiatives.
BA Blocks Courses
As mentioned above, BA Blocks offers courses tailored to the level of student’s experience and the current stage of their BA career.
BA Primer
For those at the very beginning of their business analyst careers, BA Block offers a free primer course. BA Primer consists of short lessons that take around 40 minutes to complete.
The goal of these lessons is to help students understand the role of business analysts in the organisation and how their work links business and technology by utilising the knowledge of enterprise systems, stakeholders, and requirements and specifications.
The primer course consists of three video lessons:
- Digital products / enterprise systems offering basic knowledge of enterprise software and its design.
- Stakeholder analysis explaining how to understand and manage upstream and downstream stakeholders in the context of business analysis.
- Requirements & specifications illustrating how you can use your business analysis skills to identify requirements and specifications and bridge the gap between customer needs and IT stakeholders.
Business Analysis 101
The self-directed Business Analysis 101 course is a 7-day program created for people who are entering the world of business analysis without much previous experience or knowledge in the field.
It’s designed as a tour through the most important aspects of a business analyst role, aiming to introduce tools, techniques, and processes that the aspiring BA will deal with throughout their career. The course is divided into 7 lessons:
- The agile business analysis Process
- People, processes, and digital products
- Use cases, user stories, wireframes
- Business rules, scenarios, state models
- Databases, entity models, SQL
- Advanced subjects & stage 2 BA processes
- Your personal business analysis roadmap
FOBA (Foundational Business Analysis)
FOBA (Foundational Business Analysis) is a project-driven hands-on course that takes students through the project cycle in a simulated organisation environment.
The goal of this comprehensive training program is to help you build a foundation BA skill set and understand the complexities of business analysis.
Over the course of the FOBA training, you’ll work with experienced instructors who will guide you through each of the transformations. You will work on pre-project discovery, elicitation and elaboration, and learn key methodologies including ITSM, agile, and product backlog.
The program lasts 12 weeks and consists of:
- 5 live group workshops
- 3 live office hours
- 5 instructional video lessons
- 10 example deliverables documents
- 4 assignments
Throughout the 12-week timeline, you will enjoy full instructor support helping you clear any misunderstandings and overcome any challenges you may face.
Through each of the assignments, you will shadow business analysis on a simulated solution enhancement project and produce a deliverable required by the upstream and downstream stakeholders.
So, by the end of the course, you will learn the key BA skills and foundational concepts and how to apply them to practical scenarios including:
- Process design
- User stories and use cases
- Wireframes and screen specs
- Business rules
- Data models and data dictionaries
Besides actionable and practical skills, the FOBA training program will also equip you with knowledge of the latest industry standards such as ITSM/ITIL-based processes, scrum-based processes, BABOK v3, and UML-based modelling techniques.
Another important benefit of the program is that BA Blocks is an IIBA-endorsed course provider, meaning that you will earn 36 IIBA PD hours /CDUs that you can use when applying for or renewing your IIBA CBAP certification.
BAPC (Business Analysis Practitioner Certificate)
BAPC (Business Analysis Practitioner Certificate) is another project-driven course offered by BA Blocks and intended for more advanced business analysis practitioners.
The practicum will guide you through a full-scale digital transformation initiative in a simulated organisational environment.
Over the course of the 16-week program, you will act as part of the team working on an IPMS project in the intellectual property management domain and produce the deliverables needed to create a new high-quality digital product.
Note that, to gain access to BAPC, you’ll need at least 3 years of business analysis experience or a completed FOBA course.
At the start of the course, you will be presented with a project and a case study containing all the information you’ll need to produce deliverables.
Your simulated job will be to interpret stakeholder needs into deliverables based on the stakeholders’ perspectives as presented in the case study.
This means that you will experience all stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC) for large-scale projects and learn how to produce deliverables following the guidance of a senior business analyst. While working on the project, you’ll be faced with all the challenges of delivering in complex business scenarios and get the feel for what it’s like to work in a tens real-world environment.
In this simulated project, you will be onboarded as an intermediate business analyst, so you’re expected to have a grasp of basic BA concepts, tools, and techniques. As you work on producing deliverables, you’ll have access to the toolkit utilised by large organisations and will use the following tools for sharing, collaboration, modelling, and analysis:
- SharePoint
- Visio
- Office 365
- Azure DevOps
- MS Teams
The BAPC program is fully aligned with the latest IIBA’s BABOK v3 standard and implements the industry’s best practices, tools, and techniques.
By the time you complete the course, you will have covered all 6 knowledge areas as defined by IIBA. Completing the BAPC program will earn you 40 IIBA PD hours /CDUs counting toward your IIBA CBAP certification or re-certification.
Other BA Blocks Benefits
Besides comprehensive BA courses, BA Blocks offers numerous other benefits to the members, most of which are free (some even to non-members).
BA Blocks fosters an active and welcoming community where members and instructors can exchange ideas and experiences, A team of experienced and skilled business analysts will be at your disposal to answer any dilemma or question you may have with comprehensive and actionable answers.
Furthermore, members gain access to monthly live sessions (and their replays) on the agreed-upon subjects where they can enjoy in-depth coverage of various BA topics. In addition, members will receive discounts on FOBA and BAPC course processes and gain unlimited access to the guidance back catalog.
Anyone interested in business analysis, even if they are not platform members, can enjoy a variety of educational and informative content produced by the BA Block team.
The blog section of the BA Block site contains numerous posts on the pressing issues of business analysis, as well as articles where seasoned BA practitioners share lessons learned during their years of business analysis practice.
BA Blocks also produces podcasts and has its own YouTube channel where, besides educational content, you can listen to interviews with some of the industry leaders and hear their insights on all things business analysis-related.