Analysis for Product Owners: Determine the right things to deliver

Analysis for Product Owners: Determine the right things to deliver

Released December 2015
Publisher(s): Pearson
ISBN: 0134394739

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Video description

4.5+ Hours of Video Instruction

Analysis Techniques for Product Owners LiveLessons is a video training course providing methods for understanding project stakeholders, the organizational context in which a project is occurring, the need a project is trying to satisfy, how to build a shared understanding of the solution the project is delivering, and how to organize and persist solution information, all while knowing when to apply the techniques covered.

Description

Effective product owners utilize a combination of business analysis, user experience, and product-management skills to determine the right thing to build and to build a shared understanding with their teams.

Analysis Techniques for Product Owners LiveLessons describes a set of simple yet powerful analysis techniques that product owners and team members who work with product owners can use to
  • Understand stakeholders
  • Understand context
  • Understand the need
  • Understand the solution(s)
  • Organize and persist solution information

Because no technique is appropriate in every situation, this course helps you determine the right time to use these techniques and the simplest way to apply them in order to establish a shared understanding of the problem and the best solutions to solve the problem.

Related Books:
Beyond Requirements: Analysis with an Agile Mindset
Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility

About the Instructor

Kent J. McDonald uncovers better ways of delivering value by applying agile practices and helping others do it. His years of experience include work in business analysis, strategic planning, project management, and product development in a variety of industries, including financial services, health insurance, performance marketing, human services, nonprofit, and automotive. He is active in the business analysis and agile software development communities, helping people share stories about what does and does not work. Kent has a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering from Iowa State University and an MBA from Kent State University.

Skill Level

  • Intermediate
Learn How To
  • Identify project stakeholders
  • Understand the organizational context in which a project is occurring
  • Identify the need that a project is trying to satisfy
  • Build a shared understanding of the solution the project is delivering
  • Organize and persist solution information
  • Apply the appropriate analysis techniques for the situation
Who Should Take This Course
Product owners or people on teams who spend a majority of their time supporting product owners or identifying and refining user stories and their associated requirements. Titles may include
  • Product Owner
  • Product Manager
  • Business Analyst
  • Business Systems Analyst
  • Systems Analyst
In addition, this video serves agile team members who occasionally identify and describe user stories or who consume user stories to deliver a solution (for example, developers and testers).

Course Requirements
The key prerequisites are a working knowledge of business analysis practices and techniques and software development projects. A familiarity with agile approaches is helpful.

Suggested Reading: Beyond Requirements: Analysis with an Agile Mindset

Table of Contents

Lesson 1: Helpful Concepts
Lesson 1 discusses concepts to help provide perspective when determining the appropriate analysis techniques. Those concepts include why it’s important to start with needs and then identify corresponding solutions, why it’s important to maximize outcome with minimum output, and the complementary activities of discovery and delivery. The lesson finishes with a description of the case studies that will be referenced when describing the techniques in the remainder of the lessons.

Lesson 2: Understanding Stakeholders
Lesson 2 covers techniques that are useful for understanding the stakeholders. The first two techniques are useful for understanding the people whose needs you are trying to satisfy better known as stakeholder analysis. The Stakeholder Map helps you to determine how to engage with your stakeholders, and you can use the Commitment Scale to determine what you need to do to get your stakeholders to the appropriate level of commitment for your project.

The other two techniques in this lesson help you better understand the people who are actually going to use the solution you deliver; let’s call this user analysis. User modeling is a great way to compile a comprehensive set of user roles and personas provide additional context about the people who use your solution.

Lesson 3: Understanding Context
Understanding context is familiarizing yourself with the nature of the business and sharing that information with the rest of the team. This lesson introduces several techniques for understanding the organization as a whole and using that information to guide decisions about your projects. The techniques covered include the purpose-based alignment model, six questions for understanding your differentiators, and the context leadership model.

Lesson 4: Understanding the Need
A key, but often overlooked, aspect of IT projects is figuring out the real need that must be satisfied, determining if it is worth satisfying, and sharing that understanding with the entire team. This lesson introduces a set of techniques that are helpful for performing those activities, including decision filters, the project opportunity assessment, and the problem statement.

Lesson 5: Understanding the Solution(s)
Once we understand the need we’re trying to satisfy and we’ve determined that it’s worth satisfying, we should investigate possible solutions. The plural form is intentional. Project teams often limit themselves by focusing on one possible solution too soon instead of leaving their options open. In many cases, there are multiple options.

In this lesson, you learn a variety of techniques for exploring multiple solutions and describing the solutions that seem best, all in a way that is meaningful for everyone working on the project. These techniques include impact mapping, story mapping, collaborative modeling, acceptance criteria, and other examples to further describe specifics of solutions.

Lesson 6: Organizing and Persisting Solution Information
This lesson describes techniques that help teams visualize progress and the aspect of the solution they are working on, as well as a way to persist key information about the solution for future reference. The techniques described in this chapter include: discovery board, definition of ready, delivery board, definition of done, and system documentation.

About LiveLessons Video Training
LiveLessons Video Training series publishes hundreds of hands-on, expert-led video tutorials covering a wide selection of technology topics designed to teach you the skills you need to succeed. This professional and personal technology video series features world-leading author instructors published by your trusted technology brands: Addison-Wesley, Cisco Press, IBM Press, Pearson IT Certification, Prentice Hall, Sams, and Que. Topics include IT Certification, Programming, Web Development, Mobile Development, Home and Office Technologies, Business and Management, and more. View all LiveLessons on InformIT at http://www.informit.com/livelessons.

Product information

  • Title: Analysis for Product Owners: Determine the right things to deliver
  • Author(s):
  • Release date: December 2015
  • Publisher(s): Pearson
  • ISBN: 0134394739