Building Business Capability

OCTOBER 25-29, 2021

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

Cybersecurity is no longer an IT problem to solve. Today, it’s a top priority for most business leaders, while customers expect companies to keep their information secure, and regulatory mandates increasingly add pressure to tighten controls.  And with a massive shortage or cybersecurity talent, organizations need everyone to take responsibility for cybersecurity.  We must think and act securely, bake security into designs, and become responsible stewards of risk, ensuring that cybersecurity solutions are value-driven benefits to business partners and customers. In this workshop, the presenters who are also the co-authors of the IIBA Cybersecurity Business Analysis Certification and exam writers will share strategies and methodologies to address this mammoth Cyber-world issues through tutorials, group discussions and exercises on real-life security incidents. You’ll learn to implement the key security components and take away approaches to implement today and in the ever-expanding new landscape.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• A foundation in cybersecurity concepts
• Practical skills to perform cybersecurity risk assessments
• Analyse a real-life cybersecurity breach and addressing the issues, concepts and mitigation procedures
• Applying industry standard cybersecurity frameworks
• Enhancing your capabilities and contributions to digital solutions

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.

Do you work on projects where it seems like you’re missing the mark with your external customers? Do your internal stakeholders think you lack a true understanding of their needs?

Getting to the real needs of the customer is never easy.  Accurately predicting what customers want, need, and will pay for is tough. Even if you ask them, they often can’t explain what they want.

Collaborative Games are a collection of collaboration frameworks that you can “play” with your colleagues and customers. Based on frameworks originated by Luke Hohmann, the goal is understanding the true needs of your customers.

The games themselves, while fun, are more than just play. Each game leverages deep principles of cognitive psychology and organizational behavior to uncover data that is difficult to uncover using traditional requirement elicitation. As you come to understand the power of these principles, your use of the games will improve, and you’ll find yourself able to discover even richer data.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Uncover unspoken needs and breakthrough opportunities
• Clarify exactly how and when customers will use your product or service
• Deliver the right new features, and make better strategy decisions

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

The rise of new data science techniques and applications for data-driven decision making is gaining increasing attention. But also the modeling and automation of the numerous small decisions the business has to take every day remains important. Decision modeling enables this decision transformation in the digital world. And it does so in a way which ensures correctness, consistency and compliance from the start.

With increasing demand for business process automation, the need for the automation of routine business decisions grows even more. In order to improve and speed up processes, also decisions have to be improved and automated. The business logic of those decisions must be captured effectively and correctly by the business. Decision table models offer unique features such as consistency, completeness, correctness.

This tutorial takes you from the secrets behind knowledge-based decision intelligence to decision table methodology, including best practices, examples and experiences, for modeling decision rules by domain experts in real business situations (insurance, finance, legislation, healthcare, operating procedures, …).

What Attendees Will Learn:

• How to shape related decision rules into correct and agile decision tables
• How to organize the full lifecycle of business decisions: from specification to execution and explanation
• A simple 8 step method to construct decision tables in the DMN standard
• How decision modeling can be used with, without, before or next to business process modeling
• And mainly: lessons from a long experience on how to use decision table models for business analysis in numerous application domains