According to a recent National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), 25% of the computing workforce is female.  Come listen to our inter-generational panelists discuss the challenges and opportunities for women working in the technology field.  This timely panel of professional women will explore opportunities, discuss struggles, share tips, and provide advice.

‘Holism’ originates from the Greek word ‘holos’ (= ‘all’, ‘whole’, ‘entire’) and is the concept that systems (physical, biological, social, economic …) are to be viewed as wholes, not just as a collection of its parts.BA’s are very often absorbed by their work on solutions, customer journeys, business processes … all initiatives with a certain level of impact on the whole organisation.  As such, the Holistic BA looks at an organisation as a whole and not only as a collection of employees, business domains, customers, processes, systems, change initiatives, etc…The speaker will introduce you into the world of Holistic Business Analysis, including the different organisational levels on which the Holistic BA can contribute, the various types of requirements/stakeholders/scope … and how all of these are related

Learning Objectives:

• See an organisation as a whole as well as a collection of its parts
• Explore the BA profession beyond the tasks and techniques
• Introduce concepts & techniques essential to Holistic BA

Have you heard about capability models? Do you see capability modelling as the Business Architects domain? Not sure how you can add them to the Business Analyst toolkit? This presentation will give you an introduction to capability models and the concept behind them. You will then be taken on a journey of how the Business Analysts at Coventry University have started utilising a capability model to drive transformation, inform strategic decision making and as a reference point for common language between IT and the business. You will leave with an understanding of capability models and how you can easily add them to your business analysis toolkit.

Learning Objectives:

• An overview of capability models
• How the BA can use capability models for developing a business case
• Other ways to use the model

As business decisions are increasingly made by computers these days, business analysts could benefit from a better understanding what it takes to build software that makes decisions. Using lessons learned from numerous customer projects, the presenter will use as much plain English as possible to shed light on: getting data ready for automation, modeling decisions to support automation, the iterative software development life cycle (SDLC), common risks and pitfalls in decision automation, and more. This session is geared towards people without a formal development background. Attendees should leave this session with an understanding of how to communicate better with the developers they’ll work alongside as the next business decision gets automated.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand data modeling concepts such as structured and normalized data, data relationships, and validity
• Review how automated decisions are iteratively written, tested, and implemented following the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
• Learn how to identify common risks for decision automation project failure and how to raise them sooner

We tell the story of our successful experience and approach for innovation projects. Business Analyst is expected to be value driven from both customer need and organizational motive. BA need to explicit real customer value by sensitivity and blue print strategy to action logically. We also found it effective to design new business through iterative thinking of 6 diagrams from the view of value, requirement(strategy/business), process and activity with their mutual traceability. We emphasize the importance of balancing and realizing multiple business stakeholders’ value (create HAPPINESS for all) not just pursuing the focused end-customer value for the real business success.

Learning Objectives:

• Process to design business from value to action
• Approach to ensure multiple stakeholders’ value
• Method to integrate customer’s needs and internal seeds

Building business capability is about the future. It’s about mapping the trajectory of development in our complex, exciting, unknowable business ecosystem based on our experiences, insights, and aspirations. It’s a tough gig!  Future View is the BBC panel that accepts the challenge.

Taking up the theme of this year’s conference, the panel will explore what it might mean to unleash genuine creativity in our future organizations. We’ll thread a path between the ‘obvious’ short term changes and the radical changes that perhaps seem, for now at least, more sci-fi than reality. What might it be like to experience a-day-in-the-life of a truly creative organization of the future? 

Change is soooo fun!!! No? Even if you agree (as a BA, it is your daily world, correct?), but I would expect that is not always the sentiment of your stakeholders, particularly with difficult or sensitive change. So, how do you shift the negative limbic response to a positive limbic response so you can get to the good stuff….logic? In this session we will discover the power of fun in change, learn the basics of several techniques (such as MindMapping, Speedboat and Flip It) that turn scary into fun and even practice one or two.

Learning Objectives:

• Discover how fun shifts the psychological response to negative emotion
• Understand some of the techniques to turn scary change into a little fun
• Practice application of a “fun” technique – audience choice

One of the primary responsibilities of business analysts, product owners, and all other product people is to build and maintain a shared understanding of the outcome your team seeks to deliver. Conversations are an effective way to build that shared understanding.

You may find yourself wondering who should be included in those conversations, when do you have these conversations, what should you talk about, and how do you remember what you said?

You will be introduced to example mapping, a technique that helps you structure your conversations and build a shared understanding.

You’ll learn how to determine the right people to include in your conversations, when the best time is to have those conversations, how to structure those conversations, and how to remember what you said.

Learning Objectives:

• How to determine the right people to include in your conversations to build shared understanding
• When the best time is to identify examples
• How to build shared understanding with your stakeholders and team

While attempting to understand our client’s business processes and issues, we found that there is often a gap between the strategy and the vision that led to the current implemented design. Through review of case studies, strategies do not make it into the core business operations due to lack of understanding between the current business process and the expected future state; the inability to visualize the end processes. In order to understand our client’s strategies, visions, and really dig into their issues, we have found using a holistic approach of creating 3D design models of their business from end to end paints a picture that not only helps us understand the current state of our client’s businesses and clarify requirements / issues they are telling us about but also tells us about the unknown issues that are just beneath the surface. we have been able to show an augmented current business process identifying pain points and producing future models that align with strategies while showing optimization gains before change begins.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand how 3D modeling is applied to Business Process Optimization
• Review steps taken to identify gaps in understanding current business process vs. the initiated strategy (Gap Analysis)
• Identify the real-time value of seeing business process changes lead to bottom-line impact in your business before physical change is made

At the Dutch Tax authority, the Law text is evidently the starting point of our daily operations including the implementation in software applications and systems. The Law text is, however, not usable at the operational level and needs to be interpreted and supplemented.

To deal with this issue, we have introduced a semi-automated process that starts at the Law text and generates the necessary content that is required at the next level while keeping the link to the original sources. The final product of this process is a generated software application that executes the Law without any manual programming.

Learning Objectives:

• Automate text extraction and linking of Law text to business rules
• Create a natural language pattern that fits Tax related operational rules
• Make natural language rules readily executable