Rise x LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn learning offers over 16,00 skills-development courses, and you can access them all for free as part of your Man Met studentship (usual cost £29.99/month!) And thanks to our exclusive partnership, you'll automatically earn Rise points for completing them. Here's how to get started:

1. Go to linkedin.com/learning-login
2. Enter mmu.ac.uk - this step is important!
3. Click Continue to The Manchester Metropolitan University
4. Enter your username in the following format: MMUID@stu.mmu.ac.uk, eg. 12345678@stu.mmu.ac.uk
5. Enter your usual university password

Note: Rise points will be automatically awarded at 7am each morning, based courses that you have fully completed in the previous 24 hours

Discover the skills needed to thrive in a business analyst role. Explore foundational business analysis concepts and understand key processes. Practice using software tools for common business analysis tasks.

Skills you’ll learn: 
•  Agile principles 
•  Requirements for gathering and analysis
•  Data science basics

Once you’ve completed the below courses head here to take a test and get your certificate! Don’t forget to share it on your LinkedIn profile!

What Is Business Analysis? (4 Rise Points)

Is business analysis a profession, a competency, or a research discipline? Would it confuse you if the answer to this question was all three? In this course, Laura Paton provides needed clarity by exploring the components of the profession and the necessary competencies to fulfill a business analysis role. She establishes a comprehensive viewpoint of the breadth of the business analysis profession, then helps you to recognize a core set of competencies required to effectively perform business analysis. She shows you how to make a connection between business analysis and research. Laura concludes by introducing you to the exciting variety of career paths that business analysis has to offer.

Business Analysis Foundations (8 Rise Points)

View Greta's LinkedIn Newsletter One of the main reasons given for unsuccessful project results is the lack of clear understanding of stakeholder requirements. Business analysis helps to prevent project failure by identifying and validating those requirements early on. Of course, business analysis doesn’t stop with requirements—business analysts also recommend solutions and facilitate their execution. This course provides an introduction to the foundations of business analysis. It helps demystify the role of the business analyst (BA), and outlines the knowledge and skills required to build a successful BA career. Instructor Greta Blash also provides an in-depth review of the business analysis process, from conducting a needs assessment and identifying stakeholders to testing, validation, and release. Each lesson demonstrates why business analysis works—and how you can use it to improve your organization.

Agile Requirements Foundations (12 Rise Points)

Customer needs change every day. We need our products to keep up. Take an agile approach to requirements analysis: Learn the mindset and techniques necessary to discover requirements for an agile project and succeed in the business analyst (BA) role. Angela Wick reviews the 12 agile principles from a BA's perspective, introduces backlog management techniques, and discusses techniques such as product decomposition, user stories and story maps, which help BAs deliver products that truly delight customers. Plus, find out what concepts such as "minimum viable product" and "value stream" mean to people in the BA role.

Business Benefits Realization Foundations (8 Rise Points)

Increased competition, globalization, and shifting technologies are just some of the contributing factors that require today's organizations to up their game to ensure the money they invest in product development is spent on the highest-valued efforts. Without a clear approach to define how programs and projects are selected, funded, and managed, organizations may end up delivering solutions that have a high probability of failure. Such failures include missing customer expectations, solving the wrong problems, or misaligning solutions with the direction the enterprise is moving. In this course, Laura Paton provides an introduction to business benefits realization, a practice designed to help organizations select the best change initiatives and ensure the proposed changes deliver and sustain business value. Laura breaks down the components of business benefits realization—introducing a five-part life cycle—and explains the steps for producing key business benefits deliverables.

Requirements Elicitation and Analysis (8 Rise Points)

To define great requirements, it's not enough to simply ask customers and stakeholders what they want. By leveraging requirements elicitation and analysis techniques, business analysts can come up with more innovative solutions. In this course, explore these techniques, and learn why they're important, and how to blend them together and tailor them to your project. Angela Wick provides an overview of the process, and discusses how elicitation and analysis work together. She also covers different ways of gathering requirements—such as brainstorming, observation, and workshops—before moving on to analysis techniques such as context diagrams, user stories, and decision tables. At the conclusion of the course, she explains how to select the right approach for a particular product or project type.

Business Analysis Foundations: Business Process Modeling (8 Rise Points)

When you're trying to grapple with user demands and market changes, it can be difficult to mentally zoom out and assess your organization's operations. Business process modeling helps you see the big picture by allowing you to translate your business processes into easily understood pictures. In this course, instructor Haydn Thomas walks you through the most widely used business process modeling diagrams—context, functional flow, cross-functional flow, and flowchart—and explains the purpose of each one. As Haydn touches on each modeling technique, he shares its unique features, explains how to use that technique to create a diagram, and points out how to avoid common pitfalls. He pulls it all together by comparing process diagrams so you can select the right one for your organization.

Requirements Elicitation for Business Analysts: Interviews (12 Rise Points)

Interviews can be an effective component in identifying requirements during project planning, and help business analysts and project managers understand the project from the user's point of view. This course covers interview techniques that can help build relationships with project stakeholders and obtain accurate information about project needs. Author Angela Wick helps you identify when to use interviews, who to interview, and how to plan, conduct, and follow up on interviews.

Business Analyst and Project Manager Collaboration (6 Rise Points)

In a business environment where complexity and change are the norm, business analysts and project managers can collaborate together to get more successful results and better business outcomes. If you're a PM or BA, this course will help you understand what great collaboration looks like. Explore exactly what each role entails, and what the ideal partnership can achieve. Discover how BAs and PMs can collaborate at each stage of a project, from scope management and project planning to implementation. Then find out where the roles and responsibilities overlap, and learn how to coordinate on these tasks to enhance communication, reduce risk, engage stakeholders, and more effectively respond to change requests.

Project Management Foundations (16 Rise Points)

View Bonnie's LinkedIn Newsletter Project management is a set of techniques that anyone can apply to achieve goals and make projects more successful. Project management can be used to guide small, simple projects as well as complex enterprise-wide initiatives. Bonnie Biafore has always been fascinated by how things work and how to make things work better. In this course, she explains the fundamentals of project management, from establishing project goals and objectives and building a project plan to managing resources and work, meeting deadlines, and closing the project. Along the way, she provides tips for communicating, holding meetings, keeping a project on track, and gaining customer acceptance. The course also provides an overview of the changes introduced in the Project Management Institute’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge Seventh Edition. This course provides exercises for most videos based on a healthcare/IT case study project.

Managing Projects with Microsoft 365 (4 Rise Points)

As a project manager, you likely know the importance of being able to stay on top of every last thing—and what a challenge that can be. However, this course provides you with the skills you need to manage projects more effectively by using Microsoft 365. Instructor Christine Matheney first shares the value that Microsoft Lists can provide, and shows the steps to get started using it. Christine then dives into using Microsoft Planner to help you create your project plan and manage it over time. Next, Christine reviews how you can take your project management a step further using Microsoft Project, including features that allow you to incorporate different project management approaches and methodologies. Finally, Christine reiterates common use cases for each specific project management to ensure you can feel confident in the tools you're using depending on what you're trying to achieve. If you want to organize, plan, and execute projects and track insights with ease, check out this course.

Learning Data Science: Understanding the Basics (8 Rise Points)

Many of the people who work on data science teams won't be data scientists. They'll be the managers and associates who want to gain real business value from your organization's data. These team members need to understand the language of data science so they can ask better questions, understand processes, and help effectively lead their teams and organizations to making better data-driven decisions. This course is an introduction to data science for people who aren't planning on being full-time data scientists. It introduces big data concepts, tools, and techniques, including gathering and sorting data, working with databases, understanding structured and unstructured data types, and applying statistical analysis. Business coach and author Doug Rose helps you speak the language of data science so that you can guide your organization through the opportunities and limitations in this dramatically growing field.

Managing Data with Microsoft 365 (8 Rise Points)

Managing data is a key skill in today’s data-driven business world. And Microsoft 365 offers a wide range of tools to gather, manage, and visualize your data in powerful, compelling ways. In this course, senior program manager Christine Matheney teaches you how to use the Microsoft 365 suite to manage your data more effectively. Get started with Microsoft Forms for collecting data from raw sources, before exploring how to build processes and manage large amounts of data using the different components of Power Automate. Learn why Excel is such a popular platform and how to use its built-in tools to analyze data to gain insights. Along the way, get tips from Christine on visualizing data with PowerBI to communicate your findings with the rest of the team. Upon completing this course, you'll be able to wield your new skills to manage data more effectively for better insights that everyone can understand. Note: This course was created by Microsoft Philanthropies. We are pleased to host this content in our library.