The its-all-design.com distance learning course teaches you how to be an agile Business Analyst. It’s based around the materials on this site and also on my own experiences as an agile BA.
The course content is similar to the 2-day Agile Business Analyst Deep Dive course, but you do it in your own time and at your own pace. I think this is a great way to learn – it’s very hands on and it allows you to spend some serious quality time getting to grips with the various techniques. It’s also significantly cheaper than attending an organised training course.
How It Works
The course consists of 11 “lessons”. I send you the lessons one at a time. Each lesson includes a learning / research element and a hands-on exercise. You do the learning / research part, then you complete the exercise, send it to me and I provide feedback. I usually give feedback by email but we can arrange a video chat if you prefer.
You can spend as long as you like on each lesson – there’s no time limit – but my suggestion is that you try to keep a regular pace e.g. one lesson per week or fortnight in order to keep up the momentum.
The lessons all link together so by the end of the course you will have created and designed a “toy” project of your own choosing, from inception through to detailed functional design – ready for development.
The lessons look roughly like this (although I might customise them depending on your specific needs):
- Project initiation – vision and objectives
- Scope – building a product backlog
- Estimation and prioritisation
- Discovery and options engineering
- Feature/story splitting
- Specifying behaviour using BDD scenarios and/or use cases
- UX prototyping
- Data modelling
- More story splitting
- Context diagrams and flowcharts in specifications
- Putting it all together – BADM
The course is aimed at existing or aspiring business analysts who want to learn, or improve, agile business analysis skills.
To complete the course, all you’ll need is a computer with internet access and an email address. We don’t use any specialist tools – just basic productivity tools such as presentations, spreadsheets and diagrams – if you don’t have appropriate software, you can use either Google Docs or LibreOffice, both of which are free.
You’ll also ideally need a willing volunteer to act as your Product Owner. This person doesn’t need any specialist IT skills, they just need to act as the person you are “working for”, and you’ll probably need them for up to an hour per lesson. A work colleague or family member is ideal.
Pricing
The course is still quite new, so for now I’m offering it at an introductory price of £400 (GBP) – that’s £40 per lesson. For UK customers I’m afraid there’s also VAT on top of that.
If you want, you can pay for one lesson initially (£40) and then decide whether you want to continue after that.
And I’m also offering your money back (the first £40 or the full £400) if the course isn’t working for you.
Finally, a condition of the introductory price is that you give me feedback on how I could improve the course!
Getting Started
If you want to take the course, or if you have any questions, please complete the application form. If you have any general questions about the course, please contact me.