Building Business Capability

October 19-23, 2020, at Caesars Forum, Las Vegas

Igniting Business Agility

Too often, projects or change initiatives set off with a very specific solution in mind.  Perhaps an executive has fallen in love with a particular software package and can’t wait to see it implemented.  Yet if we don’t have a clear understanding of the underlying problem and strategic context in which we’re operating, there’s a real danger that we’ll deliver exactly what is asked of us… only to find it doesn’t achieve the organization’s goals. 

This is an area where strategic business analysis can help.  In this practical, hands-on session you will hear about a range of strategic BA techniques that have application throughout the business change lifecycle.  Whether you are working in an agile, waterfall or hybrid environment, these tools will be useful.

What Attendees Will Learn:

●     Practical techniques for understanding the ‘real’ underlying problems/root causes

●     An approach for defining the outcomes that organizations are aiming to achieve

●     A technique for understanding the external business environment

●     Tips for understanding stakeholder perspectives on change

You will take away a practical, applicable toolkit that you can use on your own projects.

To succeed today you need a different mindset and approach to your work. Agile, Digital, Data and Security trends all call us to think differently, help change org cultures, and yes; we actually need to work differently!

This workshop will be an interactive experience to challenge your existing thought patterns and experiences and how you view your work and skills. You will experience activities that will challenge pre-existing norms, and help you see the future and your role differently. After each mind-bending activity, we will debrief on how the newly learned mindset is needed and used as we work with agile, digital, data and cybersecurity themes of projects.

Learning objectives:

• Challenge preexisting thought patterns about how we need to work
• Recognize new mindsets to shift to more agile, digital, data and cybersecurity themed projects
•  Identify changes that need to be made in my work to modernize my behaviors

Come join a fun, interactive, collaborative session to explore what might be holding you back from rocking the future of work!

Business Architecture provides a strong foundation for business-wide transformation, digitization and optimization and is the basis for having an agile business. Given the inherent complexities, making the right choices in what to change is not simple. Avoiding duplication and sub-optimization means that all of the moving parts must be classified, well understood and inter-connected before change can confidently begin. Business Architecture subject areas are numerous. Processes and capabilities and other important domains are complex enough. Being able to find the interconnections among them is even more so. A well-formed Business Architecture can help untangle the confusion and deliver inherently adaptable solutions.

This session will introduce some of the critical elements needed.

• Stakeholder Value Orientation
• Business Concepts / Information models
• Business Processes
• Business Capabilities
• Business Measurement
• Change Prioritization
• Process / Capability Alignment

Based on Ron’s newly released book: Business Knowledge Blueprints: Enabling Your Data to Speak the Language of the Business

Data is central to virtually every aspect of business, digital or otherwise. Traditional data design techniques have proven inadequate to current challenges. And they are neither business-friendly nor business-analyst-friendly. The issue that nags at many professionals remains how to get at the deep knowledge in business people’s heads, and lay it out for validation and reference.

Business knowledge is more complicated – far richer – than most realize. It requires a blueprint, which must be engineered conceptually. Concept models provide the answer. And they are leading the way in addressing a host of digital-era-problems – all the way from standardizing vocabulary and eliminating silos to machine learning.

How do you create a concept model? What techniques do you need to know? This hands-on session will equip you for data design – and to engineer better business capabilities in ways you never knew possible. Come ready to dig in!

Learning Objectives:

• What a concept model is and what it can be used for
• How to use a concept model for standardizing business vocabulary
• Why ambiguities arise in business communication and how they are resolved
• How business analysts can lead the way in avoiding pitfalls in data design
• How to use a concept model to achieve clarity and precision

Is your business looking for agility? To remain relevant and competitive in today’s  business environment, companies must be able to sense changes and adapt their behavior quickly. To achieve that goal I see 2 different main strategies:

1. Small autonomous multidisciplinary teams, capable of fast solution development;
2. Configurable business solutions, able to change without new development.

The second strategy is certain faster, cheaper and less risky.  It is,  unfortunately, not always available. A smart company should use both strategies, but keeping the focus of the teams on strategy 1 to deliver the solutions expected in strategy 2.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• How you can increase business agility by configuring processes and rules.
• How to create business knowledge bases during a requirement management process.
• The key techniques to map business knowledge.

Regardless of your role at work, you often find yourself running meetings, eliciting information from clients and business partners, or planning a task or project. Because we all attend meetings and we all work with others to make decisions, solve problems, build out plans, etc., it is important to learn the Essential Facilitation Skills even if you are not looking to be a Facilitator.

The Essential Facilitation Skills:

They are (1) active listening, (2) awareness of others and their behavior, and (3) “how to” move others to consensus. Developing these will make you more effective when leading or participating in meetings as well as making decisions, solving problems, building plans, eliciting requirements, etc. These skills are also the core servant leader skills – the way of the future.

This session develops these skills through lesson and significant practice. Let’s explore the Essential Facilitation skills.

Upon completion, attendees will be able to:

• Demonstrate “how to” Actively Listen.
• Know “how to” identify attendee behavior and why it’s important
• Know “how to” guide a group to consensus
• Demonstrate “how to” prepare for and define an effective meeting
• Know “how to” effectively run remote meetings.

What happens when you automate a broken process? What happens when you implement a brand-new system where the old process will no longer work? In a manufacturing environment the result would be the same defects only faster!! In business it is not much different, except the cause of defects can be much harder to spot. Improving business processes is necessary whenever implementing any new technology or seeking to optimize and gain efficiency.

This session is designed primarily for practitioners who are starting their journey in process improvement, or those who are looking for a refresher and some new ideas.

In this session you will learn how to:

• Identify if a business process is in need of improvement 
• Understand and document existing processes
• Develop a prioritized list of issues and potential areas of improvement 
• Determine root causes and potential solutions
• Synthesize the various solutions into a coherent improvement effort
• Plan and implement the improvement effort

If someone asks those of us from the Information Technology community what we do for a living, we tend to say, “we build and run systems.”  We don’t say, “we Design Enterprises,’ that is, we don’t design the Enterprise, we build what the Enterprise wants us to build.  And, our resulting system(s) ARE the Enterprise.  ENTERPRISE DESIGN is the challenge for the future.  My 50 years of research into Enterprise Architecture establishes that Enterprise Design requires the identical architectural descriptions as required for designing ANY complex product (Airplanes, Buildings, Computers, etc., etc.).  There are 30 unique descriptive representations required for designing any object and further, these descriptions must be “designed for change” as CHANGE is the constant demand.

Learning Objectives:

• The Nature of the 30 Descriptive representations required for designing Industrial Products
• The Nature of the 30 Descriptive representations required for designing Enterprises
• Seven Engineering Design Principles for Designing for Change