BBC 2026 Agenda

Can you really build the house of someone’s dreams with only a hammer and saw? Maybe, but the results will probably miss the mark. The same goes for business analysis. If we keep relying on the same old tools, we risk delivering what was asked for instead of what’s truly needed.

In today’s business environment, stakeholders expect solutions that adapt quickly, solve the right problems, and deliver value faster. That means BAs need more than just the basics.  we need a toolbox built for today’s challenges.

In this hands-on tutorial, we’ll dust off some of the classics, shine them up in new ways, and add fresh tools to your BA toolbox. You’ll practice techniques that spark better conversations, uncover hidden needs, and create solutions that hit closer to the bullseye. 

Expect energy, interaction, and plenty of “aha” moments as we hammer home how a modern BA toolbox can help you deliver faster, smarter, and better solutions that your stakeholders will truly value.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Recognize when traditional BA tools and techniques may limit solution outcomes

Apply refreshed and innovative tools to engage stakeholders more effectively

Build confidence in choosing the right tool at the right time to deliver faster, better results

This workshop illustrates hands-on, best-of-breed analysis techniques that can work together seamlessly to produce superior business solutions. Watch how a process model transforms when business rules and decisions are added. Work through a case study iteratively to demonstrate how business rules, decisions and vocabulary can dramatically improve your business requirements.

Do you have data quality problems? This workshop shows how business concepts and business rules can help you get out of the perpetual problem of creating complex logic to compensate for your data issues. Make your models come to life. Prepare your designers to develop intelligent screen designs, work out smart usage scenarios, and create test scripts. Enable your business to achieve true business agility, pinpoint customization, and world-class quality in customer service.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Simplify business process models by an order of magnitude or more.

Be a true partner in business innovation.

Use a Why Button to put business knowledge at workers’ fingertips.

Understand how business vocabulary and business rules can fix data quality problems

McKinsey predicts that AI could automate up to 70% of the work we do today. Yet the most valuable skill for Business Analysts won’t be faster analysis, it will be facilitating meaningful stakeholder conversations that lead to better decisions. Future-proof your BA career by mastering the human skills AI can’t automate (easily): creativity, facilitation, and connection.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to use Richer Pictures, a combination of simple drawings, visual models, and facilitation techniques. You will build your visual thinking toolkit to help you engage stakeholders in new and creative ways, build team alignment, and create clarity where words alone often fail. Future-proof your BA career by mastering the human skills AI can’t automate (easily): creativity, facilitation, and connection.

Whether you’re leading discovery, gathering requirements, or presenting insights, these skills will help make your analysis unforgettable.

No artistic skill required. Just curiosity, a marker, and a willingness to see the bigger picture.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Build a visual thinking toolkit to communicate ideas quickly and effectively.

Create visual canvases to facilitate your next workshop.

Design Richer Pictures to communicate a shared understanding.

Craft visual stories that make your analysis memorable and actionable.

Information will follow shortly.

Are you a business analyst curious about business architecture and wondering if it’s the next step in your career? Or perhaps you’re a business architect looking to tap into the analytical strengths of business analysis? Whether you’re exploring a transition or seeking to expand your toolkit, this session is designed for you.

Join us for an interactive, practical tutorial that demystifies business architecture and its relationship with business analysis. We’ll explore the overlapping skills, shared artifacts, and distinct mindsets that define each discipline. You’ll gain actionable insights to start your journey into business architecture—or enhance your current practice with business analysis techniques. Plus, hear a firsthand account of transitioning from BA to business architect, complete with lessons learned and tips to help you take your next step with confidence.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Understand the foundational concepts of business architecture and how they complement and extend business analysis practices.

Recognize the key differences and overlaps between business analysis and business architecture roles, including mindset, deliverables, and strategic impact.

Gain actionable steps and tools to begin your transition into business architecture or enhance your current role with cross-disciplinary skills.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, companies face increasing pressure to optimize operations, reduce waste, and enhance customer satisfaction. This Lean Business Challenge is an immersive, hands-on workshop designed to equip participants with practical skills in applying Lean principles to re-engineer business processes. Using a dynamic and interactive format, participants will be tasked with transforming a fictional operation into a model of excellence.

Participants will navigate through various scenarios, identifying and eliminating different types of waste, optimizing key processes, and ensuring that improvements are sustained. This session will not only provide a thorough understanding of Lean tools and techniques but will also emphasize the importance of continuous improvement and standardization in maintaining operational excellence. This session offers a comprehensive view of how different components of a business interact and affect overall performance.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Participants will learn to identify process waste

Learn how making small improvements can impact customer satisfaction, business operations, and process optimization

Will experience using these techniques in a fun, hands-on, and interactive demonstration

Based on Ron’s most recently 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

When it comes to business analysis, BAs get stuck right in to doing their work, eliciting requirements, creating models, consulting stakeholders, running workshops and writing documentation without much planning. The BA work required may be included as a task in the project plan by the project manager, if at all.

This lack of planning can be the cause of missing or inaccurate requirements, not to mention lots of re-work, stress and unmet stakeholder expectations – regardless of being an agile project or not. Due to change and uncertainty, detailed plans will inevitably become outdated, and a lot of waste can occur trying to keep them accurate. However, not enough planning is equally problematic.

This session will explore business analysis planning along with a ‘BA Planning Canvas’, a new tool to help us plan our work efficiently. By planning our BA activities more effectively, we will help ensure our projects deliver business value though better business analysis.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Understand the importance of planning business analysis work

Identify the elements of an effective business analysis plan

Use the BA Planning Canvas to plan and deliver better business analysis

The term “elicitation” means to bring out or expose. The requirements of a project are often hidden and must be elicited so that they can be understood, analyzed, and validated by all stakeholders.

To act as a Business Analyst, the professional must be able to “dance with the stakeholders”, adjusting the rhythm based on the context and considering cultural, behavioral, and psychological factors.

This practical workshop applies concepts throw case studies that allow the student to apply the techniques during the course, thus increasing assimilation and memorization.

The instructor makes use of theatrical techniques of role-playing characters to simulate interview and meeting situations.

The participant is encouraged to take responsibility for identifying the “real” problems and opportunities and is enabled to do so using the right elicitation technique for each situation.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Encourage the Business Analyst to take responsibility for identifying the “real” problems and opportunities.

Conducting investigative elicitation techniques.

Experience and learn how to deal with communication problems with different profiles of respondents in case studies with characters played by the instructor.

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

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Learn what aspects of Business Architecture will be right for your needs

Enhance your Business Analysis skills with a higher and wider perspective

Practice some key Business Architecture techniques

an interactive case study to break down a process and assess which parts would be candidates for AI capabilities and Agents – deterministic vs. probabilistic analysis and innovation fun. If you want a certain softskill emphasized here like facilitation – can add that in…. (I imagine a combo of small group work, AI usage, facilitation, and I guide the group through the process of analyzing an end-to-end enterprise process for AI).

Business analysis revolves around clear communication. And all of us work in a data-driven world. Consequently, if you can enhance your visual communication skills by turning data into actionable insights, you’ll be two steps ahead. That’s the purpose of this hands-on workshop: leverage commonly available tools – Visio and Power BI (PBI) – to provide actionable data visualizations for your team and leadership.

Bring a Mac or a PC because we’ll provide software licenses you can use in Safari, Chrome, Edge, or any browser.  You’ll visualize data in Visio organization charts, flowcharts, and other diagrams. And the culmination of the day will be learning enough about Power BI, and about the Visio Visual for Power BI, to create PBI reports that deliver data in the visual context of a diagram. The results are powerful, effective, and remarkably easy to create with the techniques you’ll learn in this workshop. Visio and Power BI experience are not required.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Empower decision makers with actionable data

Create insights from data by adding visual context

Leverage readily available software tools

How can you effectively select the appropriate tools for enterprise analysis? Additionally, what strategies can ensure your team’s success in this endeavor? This tutorial unveils a comprehensive guide to harnessing valuable insights from four crucial enterprise analysis methodologies: PESTLE analysis, Porter’s Five Forces, SWOT analysis, and the Three Horizons.

Discover the distinct advantages and pragmatic applications inherent in each of these four strategic techniques, useful for all business analysts. You’ll receive instruction on the timing and utilization of each method, but also be imparted the skills to maintain your team’s acumen and motivation. Gain valuable insights into integrating specific organizational elements spanning inputs, processes, and requirements. Moreover, unlock the full potential of each framework to extract pivotal insights, translate them into actionable strategies, and execute well-informed decisions.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Deep Dive into Analysis Frameworks: Gain an in-depth understanding of PESTLE, Porter’s Five Forces, SWOT, and Three Horizons analyses, while exploring how Gen AI tools can streamline data synthesis and uncover hidden trends.

Integrate Organizational Factors with AI: Discover methods to incorporate organizational dynamics and external market influences with AI-driven data analytics to improve the precision of your analyses.

Actionable Strategies for Informed Decision-Making: Learn to convert insights from both traditional methodologies and Gen AI-generated outputs into actionable strategies, ensuring that your team is well-equipped for effective decision-making and agile response to market shifts.

‘practical skills for modern and AI-ready organizations’

For: Business analysts, process analysts, operations managers, architects

Learn foundational process modeling, then apply modern design principles to real-world scenarios. This hands-on workshop teaches you to discover process context and to create BPMN models. It then shows you how to redesign processes for flexible, empowered decisions, built-in innovation, end-to-end thinking, and AI readiness.
Whether you are an experienced analyst or new to process work, you will learn modern design principles that traditional process mapping ignores. These skills enable you to identify where current processes fail organizational needs, scope improvement initiatives, and design workflows ready for today’s dynamic business environment. All content is designed for immediate application in your organization.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Process context and BPMN fundamentals

Seven modern design principles that traditional process mapping ignore

How to identify where processes fail modern organizational needs

AI offers powerful insights, but its value depends on the strength of the data foundations that support it. Without clear terminology, defined rules, and trustworthy data, even advanced AI produces inconsistent or misleading results. This tutorial helps participants move from fragmented, ad-hoc data and documentation practices toward a disciplined approach that ensures reliable, scalable value. 
Through interactive case studies and exercises, participants will see how different interpretations of the same dataset lead to conflicting answers and how aligning on shared definitions, rules, and metrics eliminates confusion. The tutorial will also cover practical governance tactics, including validation, controlled vocabularies, and metric rules, that strengthen organizational trust in data. Attendees will leave with a repeatable framework to prepare their own ecosystems for AI adoption, enabling consistent practices, stronger collaboration, and the confidence to harness AI effectively.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Collect and define shared vocabulary and rules to ensure consistent data interpretation.

Diagnose and address common data quality issues that undermine AI outcomes.

Understand how fostering a strong data culture enables teams to trust, govern, and effectively use data for AI.

You’re tired of building products nobody uses. Your users keep asking for features, but you suspect they don’t actually need what they’ve asked for.

Sound familiar? 

In this tutorial, Kent McDonald shares a set of discovery techniques from the worlds of business analysis and product management. You’ll find out how to use those techniques to identify the real problem underlying a request for a solution.

These techniques include:

– **Story-based interviews** that get people to tell you what they actually do (not what they think they’ll do—people are terrible at predicting the future).
– **Decision filters** you can use to get rid of bad ideas
– **Problem statements** that keep your team focused on outcomes.

You’ll walk away with templates, techniques, and the confidence to push back when stakeholders hand you solutions disguised as requirements.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Learn how to use story based interviews to uncover your users needs.

Facilitate conversations to establish powerful problem statements.

Understand how to create and use decision filters for more effective prioritization decisions