EXIN BCS Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis

1. What is business analysis?

• Describe the business change lifecycle
• List the key principles of business analysis
• Describe the variants of the business analyst role

2. The competencies of a business analyst

• Explain the concept of the T-shaped professional
• Identify the three areas of business analysis competency

3. The strategic context for business analysis

• Describe business analysis and the strategic context
• Define the factors assessed using PESTLE to analyze an external environment
• Identify the elements of the VMOST technique used to analyze an internal environment
• Describe the elements of performance measurement
• Describe the structure of a SWOT analysis
• Describe the techniques used in strategy execution

4. The Business Analysis Service Framework (BASF)

• Identify the activities in the BASF

5. Investigating the business situation

• Define workshops
• Define observation
• Define interviews
• Define scenarios
• Define prototyping
• Define user role analysis
• Define quantitative approaches
• Describe two diagrammatic techniques used to record a business situation

6. Analyzing and managing stakeholders

• Identify stakeholder categories using the stakeholder wheel
• Describe the use of the power/interest grid technique to analyze stakeholders
• Describe stakeholder responsibilities using a RACI chart

7. Improving business services and processes

• Explain the business process hierarchy
• List the techniques used to model the enterprise-level processes
• Describe the aspects of the event-response level
• Describe the aspects of the actor-task level
• Describe the aspects of the as-is process model
• Identify generic approaches to improving business processes
• Define the purpose of customer journey maps

8. Defining the solution

• Describe the gap analysis process
• Explain the use of POPIT™ in gap analysis
• Describe the process for developing options
• Describe the purpose of design thinking

9. Making the business case

• Describe the lifecycle for a business case in business case development
• Identify the areas of feasibility assessment
• Define the structure and contents of a business case
• List the key features relevant to the production of a business case within an Agile environment
• Identify the elements of a CARDI log
• Explain the purpose of the investment appraisal techniques

10. Establishing the requirements

• Explain the requirements engineering (RE) framework
• Identify the actors in requirements engineering (RE)
• Identify the types of requirements
• Describe the hierarchy of requirements
• Describe the requirements elicitation techniques
• Explain the elements of requirements analysis

11. Documenting and modelling requirements

• Identify the documentation styles
• List the elements of a requirements catalogue
• Describe the format of user stories
• Describe the elements of the use case diagram used to model functional requirements
• Describe the elements of a class model used to model data
• Describe the product backlog in modelling and documentation in an Agile environment
• Define the structure of the business requirements document

12. Validating and managing requirements

• Describe the types of requirements validation
• Describe the aspects of requirements management

13. Delivering the requirements

• Describe the types of delivery lifecycle
• Explain advantages and disadvantages of the lifecycles

14. Delivering the business solution

• Explain the role of the business analyst in the business change lifecycle
• Describe the role of the business analyst during the design, development, and test stages
• Describe the approaches used in the implementation stage
• Describe how the benefits plan is used in the realization stage