Continuing & Professional Education

Business and Leadership

Business Analysis helps organizations solve problems and capitalize on opportunities by assessing the potential value of solutions, facilitating their implementation, and evaluating their performance. This course explores the various ways to apply business analysis within organizations and how to strategically identify, assess and select which potential changes should be pursued. Students learn how to develop a business case that includes relevant information for executives to be able to make informed decisions.

Defining good requirements is critical to implementing successful changes. Requirements are used to establish and maintain the scope of a change. Requirements are based on stakeholder needs and are elicited through ongoing interaction with stakeholders. This course focuses on techniques for eliciting requirements, as well as exploring methods for clearly documenting requirements so that they can be verified and validated. Students learn how to develop a requirements elicitation plan and prepare requirements documentation.

This course will explore various analysis and modelling techniques to better understand the requirements associated with people, processes, and information elements in a business context. Basic business modelling tools such as organization models, workflow models and swim-lane diagrams are used to explore solution requirements. UML models (use cases, state and sequence diagrams) extend the solution requirements and establish the context for solution design. Principles of data and data analysis are introduced. Various methodologies are used to set a framework for analysis.

Effective communication is essential to successful change. Being able to understand others, provide clear information and influence without authority ensuring the ability to navigate personalities and politics. This course identifies the key elements of communication and how to leverage various delivery channels and methods to ensure messaging is received and understood. Students will also learn approaches to negotiation and how to build high performance teams, while identifying and addressing risks that arise as you prepare for and implement a change.

Great solutions address the needs of their intended users through good design. This course provides an overview of design thinking and how Business Analysts are involved in the solution design process. Students will learn how to create effective and compelling interfaces, and to develop solutions for managing data. Students will also understand how to define and assess the quality of a solution and how to create quality assurance processes.

Successful implementations provide solutions efficiently and achieve expected outcomes with minimal business disruption. This course explores factors for successful deployment and evaluation of both large and small solutions and the role Business Analysts play. Students will learn about solution transition planning, execution, post-project actions, and benefits tracking. Students will also investigate the critical link between solution evaluation and strategy analysis to complete the business analysis life cycle.

Project management has become a critical skill in every work place. Managers need to know the tools, techniques and have the knowledge to handle projects and deliver successful outcomes. Learn the basics to help you plan, execute, and control project management activities. This is an introductory project management course. We will explore successful projects and why projects that seemingly follow all the necessary rigor and methodology fail. In the end, students will leave with an enhanced ability to plan, execute and control their project management activities.

A well-managed change helps move an organization into the "new way" quickly, with wide-acceptance by people and minimal disruption. Examine the change process and tools and techniques to manage organizational change. Through reflection on past experience, you will examine key concepts of change and how to utilize a structured method to approach, plan and sustain a change program.

Knowing how to extract real business value from the data generated by your organization is a valuable tool for all managers. Topics may include: foundational information on what is meant by analytics; the various types of analytics - descriptive, predictive and prescriptive; moving from business intelligence to business analytics; theories and trends in data analytics; and the latest best practices and tools available in business analytics, including their advantages and disadvantages.

At its core, leadership is relational, connecting self and others. Topics may include: exploring the concept of "leading from the self"; leadership theories and practices; leadership styles and strengths; leadership beliefs and barriers; and the reflective practitioner of leadership.