The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning

Book excerpt: How Product Owners and Business Analysts can maximize the value delivered to stakeholders by integrating BA competencies with agile methodologies "This book will become a staple reference that both product owners and business analysis practitioners should have by their side." -- From the Foreword by Alain Arseneault, former IIBA Acting President & CEO "[This book] is well organized in bite-sized chunks and structured for ready access to the essential concepts, terms, and practices that can help any agile team be more successful." -- Karl Wiegers The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning provides practical guidance for eliminating unnecessary errors and delays in agile product development through effective planning, backlog refinement and acceptance criteria specification ---with hard-to-find advice on how and when to analyze the context for complex changes within an agile approach---including when to use Journey Maps, Value Stream Mapping, Personas, Story Maps, BPMN, Use Cases and other UML models. Renowned author and consultant Howard Podeswa teaches best practices drawn from agile and agile-adjacent frameworks, including ATDD, BDD, DevOps, CI/CD, Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, XP, Lean Thinking, Lean Startup, Circumstance-Based Market Segmentation, and theories of disruptive innovation. He offers a comprehensive agile roadmap for analyzing customer needs and planning product development, including discussion of legacy business analysis tools that still offer immense value to agile teams. Using a running case study, Podeswa walks through the full agile product lifecycle, from visioning through release and continuous value delivery. You learn how to carry out agile analysis and planning responsibilities more effectively, using tools such as Kano analysis, minimum viable products (MVPs), minimum marketable features (MMFs), story maps, product roadmaps, customer journey mapping, value stream mapping, spikes, and the definition of ready (DoR). Podeswa presents each technique in context: what you need to know and when to apply each tool. Read this book to Master principles, frameworks, concepts, and practices of agile analysis and planning in order to maximize value delivery throughout the product's lifecycle Explore planning and analysis for short-term, long-term, and scaled agile initiatives using MVPs and data-informed learning to test hypotheses and find high-value features Split features into MMFs and small stories that deliver significant value and enable quick wins Refine, estimate, and specify features, stories, and their acceptance criteria, following ATDD/BDD guidance Address the unique analysis and planning challenges of scaled agile organizations Implement 13 practices for optimizing enterprise agility Supported by 175+ tools, techniques, examples, diagrams, templates, checklists, and other job aids, this book is a complete toolkit for every practitioner. Whatever your role, you'll find indispensable guidance on agile planning and analysis responsibilities so you can help your organization respond more nimbly to a fast-changing environment. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.