An internal certification program for business analysis should be a joint effort between a company's training department and its established BA Center of Excellence.

Objectives of an Internal BA Certification Program

There are many goals to be achieved by establishing an internal BA certification program:

• Raise the performance standards for business analysts within the company. 
• Educate BA staff about proven best practices amongst the company's various departments. 
• Align industry standards with the company's standard project management lifecycle and system development lifecycle methodologies. Thus, management doesn’t have to worry about their company’s BA staff utilizing analysis techniques and methodology standards that their company may not recognize. 
• Additionally, such a BA certification would align IIBA best practices and methodology standards with the company-wide BA procedures and audit practices. 
• Provide a training outlet within the company for BAs to gain PDUs (professional development units) with the IIBA (or other professional organizations) as well as CECs (continuing education credits) with academic institutions. This is accomplished by partnering with a vendor approved by the IIBA, which will ensure that the majority, if not all of a company's BA staff, will receive the same quality training.

Training Vendor Partnership

Partnering with a training vendor is critical to the overall success of an internal certification program for the following reasons: 

• BA staff from different departments will receive the same quality training and tools. 
• BA staff will be seeking external training opportunities as a last resort. 
• Most training vendors provide a discount for a group of class registrations from the same company. As an added measure of ROI (Return On Investment), partnering with a training vendor will save the company training costs.

Internal Certification Structure

An internal certification program should be structured with key educational design factors in mind: 

• To be certified, candidates would be required to pass an examination with questions based on the core knowledge areas of business analysis as well as experience/scenario based short essays. This would be a single examination encompassing all the core knowledge areas that make up the BA profession, in addition to the company’s standard project management lifecycle and system development lifecycle methodologies. 
• Candidates would be required to complete a minimum number of annual volunteering/activity hours with the company's BA Center of Excellence and/or their local IIBA Chapter (in case only one exists.) 
• Candidates would be required to complete a set number of courses (or be waived by passing knowledge/skills assessment for each course). An ideal outline of BA courses would include the following:
  

  Course Outline	Mandatory for BA Career Levels
  1) Corporate Strategy and Business Domain	BA-1, BA-II
  2) Advanced Knowledge of the Business	BA-II, BA-III, Senior BA
  3) Introduction to Business Analysis	BA-I
  4) Overview of the Organizational	SDLC BA-I, BA-II (optional)
  5) System Design Concepts	BA-I, BA-II
  6) Essentials of Risk Management and Validation	BA-I, BA-II, BA-III
  7) Business Process Modeling	BA-I, BA-II, BA-III, Senior BA
  8) Business Requirements Elicitation and Management	BA-I, BA-II, BA-III, Senior BA
  9) Advanced Business Analysis	BA-III, Senior BA (optional)

• Provide an outline of optional courses in business analysis for non-BA staff interested in business analysis or who perform occasional BA roles, such as project managers, developers and testers.

So you can see, establishing an internal BA certification would be of great benefit to many corporations and forward-thinking organizations, regardless of size. This would ensure that the organization has the near perfect talent pool of BA skills and knowledge from both industry-wide and internal corporate points of view. Thus, an organization’s BA staff can more realistically balance internal project weaknesses and strengths with external market threats and opportunities.

© Youssif Ansara, 2007