Target Audience

EPFL Engineers who want to become

-        Business Analysts

-        Requirements Engineers

-        Project Managers

-        Management and IT consultants

-        Product Owners

Content

Technological and societal changes are pressuring enterprise IT departments to hire engineers with excellent technical and business skills. Their roles are called business analysts, requirements engineers, or product owners. Their skills enable the bidirectional alignment of business needs and IT capabilities. With IT becoming the most important enabler of enterprise strategy, these roles are becoming crucial in many organizations, large and small, private or public.

We use experiential learning beginning with concrete experience, followed by reflection and abstraction to encourage collaborative learning by doing. You will be part of a small team that needs to understand and solve a business case through fast-paced role-playing with the teaching staff. This is interspersed with lectures on the nature of organizations, business analysis and the role of enterprise IT. Several external speakers from industry illustrate what we see in class.

We will explore the following subjects:

-        The nature of organizations

-        Problems and solutions

-        Requirements elicitation

-        Enterprise modeling

-        Low-code prototyping

-        Creating a request for tender