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Category: Analytics

Digital Technologies – Predict & Prescribe via Analytics

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

In a world where customer is king and has a plethora of options to choose from, client engagement and retention is driven by Digital Technologies. This necessitates the business to consolidate data from internal sources as well as external ones like Social Media, emails etc to enable targeted and relevant offerings as per specific customer interests. A large quantum of inputs has to be generated to enable ourselves for this is fairly achievable, by following customer needs, feedback & social media. Additionally it is imperative to have the databases for knowing current customer and prospect profiles, which includes their demographics, geography, and expressed interests.

Insightful Analytics plays an incredible role in bringing the customer and business together in a continuous engagement as it boosts customer experience, through appropriate offering which may not be evidently visible without usage of advanced analytics. It also helps to predict by systematically analyzing customer history in terms of their purchasing trends, shifting preferences and how they may like to interact with and respond to the business. The following steps are extensively used by businesses today:

  • Predict – Analyze customer’s history; predict how they will act – as expressed by what they browse and what they buy, how they interact etc.
  • Prescribe – Advisory and personalized prescriptions, product recommendations based on customer needs, and offering a personalized, client centric product or service.

To build this ability, replacing the existing Legacy application stack may not be the most Optimum decision and that actually is not possible in all such cases where traditional businesses have been using applications which seamlessly blend business with IT for smooth conduct of services offered.  In such cases, organizations choose to upscale the stack appropriately and continue to thrive. Of course there are certain definite enablers which such organizations will need in order to achieve the needful within existing stack of applications.
Enablers getting significant attention in market place today:

Cloud Enabled Delivery

This includes leveraging the right blend of private, public and hybrid cloud ecosystem for most optimum computation and storage capacity. Addendum provisions to handle sudden loads through auto scaling and accelerated speed to market. In the Digital era, making the erstwhile IT systems ready for the future is one of the key success factors for accelerating the speed of business. This involves modernizing the legacy stack with ease of implementing alternatives, enabling faster results with contained risks.
Quick & accurate identification of the optimum fit involves a solution that imparts agility to surf through the large IT landscape and determine the best fit modernization approach for a particular area to Improve Business/IT collaboration through insights

Digital Readiness

It is important to enable legacy applications with Analytics & Cloud platforms by unlocking the potential of existing assets, as also taught in big data courses in India. This accelerates delivery of business innovations through connectivity to the ecosystem of customers, channels and vendors in a secure manner. Organizations need to be careful to have an ‘Inclusive‘ approach that enables co-existence of old along with new.

How to enhance core systems as effective expeditors:
Organizations need to drive business innovations in the Digital Era and that shall necessitate improving the Core Systems to deliver end to end agility, flexibility & scalability. To strip this approach down to simplistic one we can recourse to either / or both of the 2 below

Cloud First

To Impart required scale through flexible deployment of platforms on either private, public, hybrid cloud and Enables applications to scale automatically depending on the utilization and workload parameters

Mobile First

To Build for the future by prioritizing accessibility from Mobile devices over desktops and by leveraging responsive designs along with content prioritization

Imarticus Learning, an Education Excellence 2015 award winner offers certification courses in finance including financial modeling, risk management courses, financial analyst course and CFA course in India. It offers both classroom and online finance courses to make it extremely easy and flexible for an aspirant to pursue their dream career.

Business Model Canvas – Analysing new business ideas

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

Many firms around the world look to diversify / enhance their product offerings and would like to leverage the experience of its senior management team to come out with new ideas. That is something ideally one would learn in a business analyst course.
What the firm ideally requires is a unified business model generation that combines the experience of the entire team through structured, tangible, and strategic conversations around new businesses.
Often, though, we make the mistake of assuming that good ideas just happen. Or worse still, we get caught in the mind trap that creativity is an aptitude; some people have it, others don’t. Then there is the other self-defeating belief – “I am not intelligent enough to come up with good ideas.”
The solution:
Alexander Osterwalder, co-founder of strategyzer.com, has invented a Business Model Canvas which is a simple template describing nine building blocks that show the logic of how a company intends to make money. The business model is like a blueprint for a strategy to be implemented through organizational structures, processes, and systems. The canvas’s main objective is to help companies move beyond product-centric thinking and towards business model thinking.

  1. Customers – kind of important – who are they? To build an effective business model, a company must identify which customers it tries to serve. Various sets of customers can be segmented based on the different needs and attributes to ensure appropriate implementation of corporate strategy meets the characteristics of selected group of clients.
  2. Value Propositions – the thing your customers want – do you really know what your customers want? The collection of products and services a business offers to meet the needs of its customers.
  3. Channels – you touch your customers via these – how do you attract to your customers? Effective channels will distribute a company’s value proposition in ways that are fast, efficient and cost effective.
  4. Customer Relationships – You interact with your customers with these – how do you keep your customers?
  5. Revenue Streams – show me the money! Is it coming from multiple places? The way a company makes income from each customer segment.
  6. Key Resources – from what do you create to make that thing your customers want? The resources that are necessary to create value for the customer, they are considered an asset to a company, which are needed in order to sustain and support the business. These resources could be human, financial, physical and intellectual.
  7. Key Activities – The most important activities in executing a company’s value proposition.
  8. Key Partnerships – do you have any of these to make getting clients easier? In order to optimize operations and reduce risks of a business model, business analyst online training normally trains organizations to cultivate buyer-supplier relationships so they can focus on their core activity. Complementary business alliances also can be considered through joint ventures, strategic alliances between competitors or non-competitors.
  9. Cost Structure – how much is this all costing? This describes the most important monetary consequences while operating under different business models.

This tool resembles a painter’s canvas—pre-formatted with the nine blocks—which allows you to paint pictures of new or existing business models. The Business Model Canvas works best when printed out on a large surface so groups of people can jointly start sketching and discussing business model elements with sticky notes or board markers. It is a hands-on tool that fosters understanding, discussion, creativity, and analysis.
This canvas has many early adopters across Europe and America. The influence of the canvas continues to grow in these regions. We believe in India with increased interest towards entrepreneurship and innovation this business model canvas would be a useful tool for startups as well as for established firms in their search for the right business model.
Imarticus Learning, an Education Excellence 2015 award winner offers certification courses in finance including financial modeling, risk management courses, financial analyst course and CFA course in India. It offers both classroom and online finance courses to make it extremely easy and flexible for an aspirant to pursue their dream career.
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12 Reasons to have a Business Analyst Career

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There are many reasons why one would like a Business Analyst career.  It could be at a point where operations seem a mundane task or you would like to pursue an alternate career of your choice, and you would prefer to do business analyst online training.  It could also be that you have potential strengths like:

Problem Solving

BA’s are the go-to people for the operations and the IT team.  They act as liaison officers who are able to put off fires before the operations team go live on any projects. If you can solve even just a few problems and help a few people understand each other better, you’ll have done your good work for the day.

Innovation at Its Best  

If you can think you can have a quick turnaround or alternate solutions to simple problems and can see through great ideas, this career is an ideal one. You might not be the one with the best idea, but you know a great idea when you see one. And you are motivated to see that idea when everyone else’s attention has moved on to the next great thing.

Communication is The Key

You realize people are just talking to each other but not communicating with each other and assist in clarifying things. You ask a lot of questions and like to know it all.

Documentation and Research

You do read through meeting notes from ages ago to save repetitive discussions.  You document the same in the most structured format. You do like creating Business Requirement Documents as taught in a business analyst course.

Subject Matter Expertise

Building on your deep business experience, whether as a subject matter expert, technical writer, project manager, salesperson or recruiter or a banker. All of this experience you have adds up to something and has prepared you to be a great business analyst. The idea of learning a lot of new stuff in a relatively short period of time is exciting. BAs are the ones who do come to conclusions.

You are attracted by the prospect of a nice pay.

  • Manage the implementation of the Project: You like finding the solution to the business problem but are content to leave the implementation details to someone else.
  • Productive meetings: While many IT roles require some degree of weekend or evening work, a typical business analyst role allows you to turn off your cell phone and keep a fairly standard workday; productive meetings where everyone leaves feeling like their time was well spent.
  • The sense of independence: You will spend a fair amount of time working independently, maybe as much as two-thirds of your day. Business analysts tend to spend about 2/3 of their time working independently and 1/3 of their time in meetings and interacting with stakeholders.
  • Change things:  You make sure that when you make a change, there are no unexpected negative impacts.You are naturally curious and like to figure things out and learn how things work.
  • Continuously scope for improvement: You tend to look for continuous improvement and know you and your organization can do better. (This is called business process improvement.) You would also like to drive changes in your organizations, whether that means sitting down with the customer service rep to understand their processor working with the VP to reorganize their department. You do not get lost in your work and are able to see the big picture and never lose track of important details. You like the idea of working with lots of different people, at all levels of the organization and want to help others by making their work more enjoyable and productive.
  • Job Security: You are looking for some job security and see the evidence everywhere that business analysis is a growing profession.

At Imarticus Learning, we offer business analyst certification online and in the classroom for those that want to enter this exciting domain. The Business Analysis Certified Professional program is an IIBA Accredited and also suitable for careers in Business Analysis and Project Management across various functions like Technology, Operations and Finance.

7 Trends in Operations Risk

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

Human behavior based risk solutions have deficiencies. The aggregate impact of the top 50 operational loss events is estimated to be $60bn over a 12 month period. The notable cases over the past decade include the 2008 SocGen case due to unidirectional positioning and unsuitable investments in complex derivatives by JP Morgan, UBS and others in 2012.
Consequently, a safe financial institution now is not one which takes no risks or is risk-compliant, but one which is organizationally and technologically able to withstand the crises of the future. “Big data” and “big analytics” are rapidly being applied to enterprise risk, compliance and governance across all industry sectors. Recent settlements related to questionable business practices have further heightened interest in the management of operational risk at financial institutions. In addition to the above, the global slowdown has necessitated higher efficiency and lower costs. Thus, the past twelve months saw accelerated growth in big data analytics based integrated risk, compliance and governance solutions.

Here are the 7 trends to watch this year in this domain:

  1. 2016 will continue to see a shift towards automated reporting and risk data aggregation to meet global regulatory standards. Further, the ongoing slowdown ensures that these governance, risk and data management practices will be outsourced.
  2. Agile risk management solutions are the key for the sell-side to combat increased regulatory pressure, capital scarcity and time constraints. Hence, the sell-side needs to gear up with integrated solutions that enable optimization, limits management, margin simulations, liquidity and market risk management, stress testing and model risk management, data management and visualized reporting.
  3. The buy-side continues to play a pivotal role in the financial system. Thus, face risk, governance and compliance requirements at par with banks. Integrated on-demand, nimble and bespoke solutions across asset classes are the solution.
  4. The financial crime and cyber threats areas face a similar situation due to increased regulation. Here as well, the rise of integrated and aligned risk and compliance solutions will be essential to combat financial crime risks.
  5. IFRS 9 will push financial institutions to perform more complex calculations. This in turn will require more extensive use of risk data and consequent investment in areas of event based accounting, real time cash flows and multi GAAP ledger functionality.
  6. Stress testing models failed to spot 2008. Integrated enterprise wide stress testing and modeling will be necessary to reduce model risk. Key problem areas to overcome are alignment methodologies, information technology infrastructure and governance.
  7. The energy trading market will shift towards network and generation based markets and away from the commodities trading market place. Thus, unique risk management systems for energy trading and logistics focused commodities trading will gain importance.

This is a small taste of what you will learn in Management Development Program, operational risk management workshop on 21st to 22nd January, 2016.

Role of Analytics in today’s Scenario!

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Role of Analytics in Today’s Scenario!

The role of Business Analytics has evolved over the years. Although analytics has been around for a long while, it wasn’t until the last 5 to 10 years that its importance in the business field has been realized. It was in the last 10 years that technology has been revolutionized and we now produce about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. 

This is more data than what was collected in two years previously.

This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data. What has also changed in the last decade is that we now have the means to sift through these 2.5 quintillion bytes of data in a reasonable amount of time. All these changes have major implications for organizations today. This emphasises more on the role of business analytics in today’s times. 

In organizations, analytics enables professionals to convert extensive data and statistical and quantitative analysis into powerful insights that can drive efficient decisions.

Therefore, with analytics, organizations can now base their decisions and strategies on data rather than on gut feelings. Moreover, with the rate at which this data can be analyzed, organizations can keep tabs on the customer trends in near real-time. As a result, the effectiveness of a strategy can be determined almost immediately. Thus, with powerful insights, analytics promises reduced costs and increased profits.

With a sudden surge in the analytics industry, there is a tremendous increase in the demand for analytics expertise across all domains, and throughout all major organizations across the globe.

This adds to the importance of Data Analytics courses and how the youth must pursue a career in Data Analytics. 

IBM’s recent study revealed that “83% of Business Leaders listed Business Analytics as the top priority in their business priority list.”

Deloitte has mentioned in its study that – Decision makers who can leverage everyday data & information into actionable insights for the growth of their organization by taking reliable decisions, will find themselves in a much better position to achieve strategic growth in their careers.

Importance of business analytics

Organizations employ Business analytics so they can make data-driven decisions. The role of business analytics helps any organisation with an excellent overview and insight into how companies can become more efficient, and these insights will enable such businesses to optimize and automate their processes. It is no surprise that data-driven companies, that also make use of business analytics usually outperform their contemporaries. The reason for this is that the insights gained via business analytics enable them to; understand why specific results are achieved, explore more effective business processes, and even predict the likelihood of certain results.

Business analytics also offers adequate support and coverage for businesses that are looking to make the right proactive decisions. Business analytics also allows organizations to automate their entire decision-making process, to deliver real-time responses when needed.

One of the apparent importance of business analytics is the fact that it helps to gain essential business insights. It does this by presenting the right data to work it. This goes a long way in making decision making more efficient, but also easy. This is another reason to make a promising career in data analytics.

Efficiency is one area of business analytics that helps any organization to achieve immediately. Since its inception, business analytics have played a key role in helping business improve their efficiency. Business analytics collates a considerable volume of data on time, and also in a way that it can easily be analyzed. This allows businesses to make the right decisions faster.

Business analytics help organizations to reduce risks. By helping them make the right decisions based on available data such as customer preferences, trends, and so on, it can help businesses to curtail short and long-term risks.

There is an information overload in today’s world and data analytics helps to cut out the clutter to help businesses make safe and smart choices.

Summary

We can conclude that Business Analytics is a field that holds a lot of potential & importance in the way any organisation operates. It indeed is the best time to make a career in Data Analytics. You can always check out our Data Analytics courses to know more.

Key Questions in Business Analysis in 2017

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

Business Analysis deals with identifying problems and the need for change in an organization and providing solutions to the problem and facilitating change. Business Analysts identify the needs of a business and provide solutions that will deliver maximum value to stakeholders. Business analysts work across all levels of an organization and may be involved in everything from defining strategy, to creating the enterprise architecture, to taking a leadership role by defining the goals and requirements for programs and projects or supporting continuous improvement in its technology and processes.
But as businesses get more complicated, questions surrounding Business Analysis also change and get more dynamic. Here are some of the top questions and trends in Business Analysis and business analysis courses and workshops in 2017.
What is Distributed Leadership and is effective? As leadership gets more distributed and the one decision-maker model crumbles, Business Analysis will have to create models that take into consideration more than one variable
How will better Design and technology affect Business Analysis? Apps are making a huge difference in business Analysis. How does that impact model making and problem definition?
Is there value in certification?  We believe there is value in Business Analysis courses and the rise in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) reflect the interest project managers have in improving business analysis skills and problem-solving models
How does creativity and entrepreneurship affect Business Analysis? Business Analysis certifications focus on frameworks. What is the role of creative entrepreneurship in that?
How will Agile training change as a business move towards teamwork rather than focusing on the individual? And how do we make teams react to organizational change better?
Find out the answers to all these questions by enrolling in BACP, the leading Business Analyst Course in Mumbai. Click here for more information.

The Data Analytics Employment boom

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They are not just for engineers and IT departments — analysts could come from just about anywhere
Big data has been constructively cast as “the new oil” and held up as the economic counterbalance to America’s sinking developed sector. As oil did at the beginning of the last century, big data is going to drive economies in the centuries ahead. But it may not do so in the way that many people think it will. This Oil is even more productive because it’s a never ending fuel to the new horizons of IT industry brimming across the globe.
“Advances in software, interface designs, and things like that will make it easier to analyze big data in the future,” says Dr. Betsy Page Sigman, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and an expert on technology and information systems. “So it won’t be as big of a technological hurdle. The more important thing for companies will be to have a lot of people that understand not just how to produce statistics and analytics, but understand how to make better decisions because they have this information.” Not just that, there is an emerging trend of data analytics positions in India, there is a boom in business analytics training across various cities likes Mumbai, Bangalore and various other metro cities as well.
Part of this shift will simply require the retooling of existing jobs, but there is also a new class of positions and skills emerging as well. Spohrer says, positions like “chief data officer” and other “data scientists, data researcher, data technology head” that will become more common within existing companies, both large and small. These jobs won’t necessarily be occupied by deep analytics-types, but by non-data professionals educated and experienced in their chosen industry while also skilled in the use of big data tools.
As with oil, companies know data is out there in large quantities and that it’s not enough to simply know where it is — it has to be extracted, refined, and delivered in a usable format to be valuable. And like the energy economy before it, the data economy needs dedicated people — 4.4 million of them by 2015 in the IT field alone, according to an oft-cited Gartner Research analysis.
But here the similarities end. The oil patch has never had much trouble finding and training enough roughnecks to get oil out of the ground, but training up skilled big data professionals is a different enterprise entirely. In the U.S. alone, a McKinsey & Company report projects a shortfall of between 140,000 and 190,000 “deep analytical” big data professionals by 2018 — that is, people with highly technical skills in machine learning, statistics, and/or computer science, the actual hands-on big data people that know how to crunch huge data sets into meaningful information.
Academically, big data is playing a role in decidedly non-data disciplines, like some portions of the social sciences and humanities, says Jim Spohrer, computer scientist and director of IBM’s Global University Relations Programs. It will increasingly become integral in medical research, various kinds of product development and modeling, and all types of research science. To remain competitive, companies will require professionals at all levels that fundamentally grasp big data concepts and know how to use them to their advantage. But what’s often overlooked in this dim projection of the big data labor market is that the impact of big data on employment goes far deeper than the deep analytics and IT fields. Companies need professionals at all levels that are not necessarily schooled in deep analytics but are nonetheless big data-savvy. These professionals don’t need degrees in computer science or statistics. It’s been a general trend in India otherwise to acquire technical degrees of BE, B. Tech before any further advancement in skill development in any fields, let alone data Analytics. But data analytics training now suffices for a good beginning in Data related domain. But even if it is packaged along with a good degree and any other tags it can add to additional amount in any given package. A VP at management consulting and technology advisory outfit Booz Allen Hamilton recently told Information Week that the company has had great success bringing physicists and music majors onto data science teams — creative thinkers who know less about computer science and more about how to look at big data problems in a different way. Though companies and economies will certainly need data scientists to manage their massive databases and information technology teams to support them, to a far greater degree they’ll need professionals knowledgeable and creative enough to leverage big data to the greatest possible advantage.
Any employment bump tied to the proliferation of big data analytics won’t be confined to IT departments or even to dedicated “data divisions” that emerge within companies. And it isn’t just big data specialists like data scientists and statisticians that stand to benefit from this boom. Big data opportunities are already being exploited in data-centered pursuits like risk management, marketing and research science, but the applications are virtually limitless. Existing companies will expand as they deploy more big data resources — both human and technological — to leverage big data to their advantage. But the space to watch isn’t necessarily existing companies reorganizing to embrace big data, but the emerging big data industry where deep analytical job growth is likely to make its biggest economic impacts. As with so many other specialized endeavors that fall outside the purview of core business — things like advertising and marketing, the latter of which is itself being completely transformed by big data analytics — many big data applications will be farmed out to outside contractors who specialize in big data analysis and problem solving, Sigman says. Scores of big data startups are already emerging (largely with the help of venture capital) to meet this demand, including MapR, ParStream, ScaleArc, and Cloudant. The ones who are able to best meet their customers’ data analytics needs are poised to become home to many of those many millions jobs big data will generate over the next few years.
Source- Fortune & Investopedia
Ananya Pandey – Senior Counselor, Imarticus Learning

A List of Great Non-fiction Books That Reveal The Power of Data

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Here at Imarticus we believe in continuous learning and this is reflected in the profile of the students in our BAP (R) program, is a comprehensive, short-term business analytics training program in Mumbai that provides aspirants with a thorough understanding of R programming language for effective and efficient data analytics. But it’s not all about textbooks in Business Analytics Professional, as our reading list also focuses on the great non-fiction books that reveal the power of data.

Moneyball –The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

A classic book by Micheal Lewis, the book is the story of how a football manager turned around the fortunes of bleeding Baseball team by using Big Data. Using analytics he identifies underrated and hence, undervalued players in the league to bring them together and build a great team on a budget.

Freakonomics- A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How much do parents really matter? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head.
Our Business Analytics training program helps you acquire the renowned Business Analytics certification, EMC certification in Data Science and Big Data Analytics.

3 Important Tips for Business Analysts

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A lot of effort and hard work is needed to perfect the skills required by a business analyst, but dedication and determination will help one can excel in this field. If you’re marching towards becoming a successful Business Analyst then you must read the following points:

  • Performance check:

It is important for all the aspiring traders to develop a habit of keeping an unbiased record of their performance. This would help them gauge their strong as well as weak points

  • Keep upgrading your knowledge:

Always be eager to learn new things related to the market. Up to date knowledge will help you to generate new ideas to improve yourself in order to perform to the best of your abilities

  • Be prepared for challenges:

The corporate world is very unpredictable; you might have to face a number of challenges and tricky situations. So it is advised to prepare yourself to face all sorts of difficulties that you might come across

A lot of professional courses are also available to help you enhance your business and trading skills. You can consider joining a business analytics certification course, which ensures better insight into this field

Business Analysts Making Way For Profitability in Organizations

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

The 21st century has witnessed business analysis as one of the core business practices. Reason being, almost each industry possesses skilled business analysts who contribute to the overall profitability, thus proving to be a vital link between their information technology capabilities and business objectives. This eventually narrows down to the fact that the rapidly changing marketplace presents a host of opportunities for business analysts.  However, training is undoubtedly very essential seize this opportunity as it prepares them with the skills desired to remain competitive in the modern organizations.
What role does a business analyst play in an organization?
Present day business environment is highly wavering wherein nothing can contribute to the extent that innovation can. Hence, the key to success lies in an organization’s adaptability, agility, and ability to manage constant change through innovation. The emphasis has been laid upon innovation for the fact that during the unfavorable economic conditions, traditional methods may not lead to reaching objectives. That’s where business analysis and the role of business analysts come into play.
Profitability of an organization could be achieved when the projects successfully meet the customer objectives through new products and services. In this case, the business analyst contributes a lot towards analyzing what all is working in favour of the organization and suggesting the areas that desire change. They can make it all happen more efficiently and effectively.
The business analyst’s primary objective is helping businesses implement technology solutions in a cost-effective way by determining the requirements of a project or program, and communicating them clearly to stakeholders, facilitators and partners. Business analysis training at Imarticus Training inculcates the basic skills required to lead as a business analyst for firms. This not merely helps develop the technical solutions to business problems but also helps in advancing the sales efforts.
Business analysts typically take the lead role in:

  • Assisting with the business case
  • Planning and monitoring
  • Eliciting requirements
  • Requirements organization
  • Translating and simplifying requirements
  • Requirements management and communication
  • Requirements analysis

Wish to be a successful business analyst? Contact Imarticus Learning for comprehensive industry specific training programs in various sectors such as Financial Services and Analytics.