BBC 2023 Agenda

Agenda Announced

The backlog is a beautiful, powerful, and delightfully simple tool for managing variability and uncertainty in modern agile organizations. Unfortunately,  the backlog can also be a major impediment to flow and break the value stream with substantial economic loss. This happens because our traditional model of backlog management presents the backlog as a stack of plates reservoir for the development team.

Agile grew up, and now so does our model of the backlog. This tutorial introduces the Rock Crusher, a flow based model for backlog management.

Participants will explore the Rock Crusher and design their own implementation of the model for use in their own context.

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

Imagine the scene: You’ve been parachuted into a business area, and there are all sorts of conflicting stakeholder perspectives. One thing they agree on is they want change, and they want it now! They tell you that they desperately need a new IT system… but the more people you speak to, the more you start to doubt whether the IT system they have in mind will actually solve their problems. 
In fact, when you scratch beneath the surface, it seems that different stakeholders are trying to achieve vastly different things.  Not only this, there is a pressure to “just get going” and “stop asking questions and get on with it”. But you can’t help feeling that if the initiative charges ahead it’ll be an expensive mistake that won’t solve the underlying problems. In fact it might even make things worse!
If this sounds familiar, then this half day interactive and ‘hands-on’ session is for you.  We’ll cover some practical tools and techniques that can help you collaborate with stakeholders to understand the real business need and gain buy-in along the way.

During this session you’ll hear techniques for:

• Analyzing the stakeholder landscape (including the politics)
• Understanding problems, root causes and the real business need
• Ensuring there is a common view on what is being achieved by an initiative
• Working with stakeholders to ‘step back’ and innovate

This is a practical session with a range of hands-on exercises where you’ll have the chance to practice a few techniques during the session. You’ll walk away with a practical and applicable toolkit that you can apply in your day job.

Business analysis is a team sport and requires great leadership to achieve success. Leadership isn’t a position or a role, it’s all about influencing those around us to enable better outcomes. Join Jared and Danelkis for another action-packed interactive session that tackles the thorny question of what it takes to be a leader in your organization and equips you with some of the techniques to lead your team to victory!

Like anything new, there are generally sceptics, or early adopters who want to invest time and energy to learn new techniques and concepts, or those that dabble and begin their learning journey. 

This masterclass will showcase why Design Thinking should be in every Business Analysts toolkit.  What it is?  When to apply it? How to apply?  How to influence stakeholders in the importance of the design thinking mindset?

One of the reasons why I love DT, is it a mindset, it is all about the application and how to use the methods and tools to constantly deliver value driven outcomes.  There is no real right or wrong.  It is about learning, adapting, evolving, reflecting, testing, trialling, being innovative and having a bit of fun along the way.

Life, after all is one continuous journey, full of change, curve balls, moving goalposts, and we need to embrace new ideas and opportunities.

The Business Analysis Core Concepts Model (BACCM) is presented in a hands-on workshop in two parts.

In the first part, the presenter uses a specific moment from the Star Wars series to invite everyone to fill in a canvas that goes through each of the 6 BA core concepts in a fun and illustrative way from the perspective of different characters from the saga.

In the second part, the participants will learn how to use the BACCM Canvas as a technique to get a high understanding of a Case Study. This technique may be used to facilitate workshops wherever they work in different scenarios.

Your organization wants to become more data focused. Leadership is asking for “data-driven decisions” and may even be interested in adding a Data Scientist or two. But where do you start? How do you know if you’re doing the right thing?

This tutorial will provide a framework for assessing the health of your data organization holistically. This includes not only the technical and analytical data capabilities, but also the human side of data – resourcing, culture, governance, community, and more. We will also provide tips, tricks, and anecdotes from our experiences to help you improve your data organization.

Come prepared to reflect upon these questions for your own organization and bring discussion questions to the group. This tutorial will provide you with practical questions and templates that you can use to assess your organization’s data capabilities and address the essential capabilities required for a thriving data organization.

At its core Knowledge Capability is about sharing and collaborating about what you know, capturing what you know, and reusing that knowledge so as to not reinvent the wheel and/or to combine with other ideas to foster innovation. Knowledge capability connects people to expertise and provides knowledge to help them perform their duties in a more effective and efficient manner, which aligns with the strategies and objectives of the organization to improve performance. Today, many organizations across myriad industries have found success initiating, executing, and sustaining knowledge management programs. In this tutorial a review of Knowledge Capability from strategy to processes, architecture and KM Systems will be presented. Also, discussion around Knowledge-as-a-Service which incorporates machine learning in the delivery of knowledge.

MVP, Lean Startup and Innovation approaches explain us to learn through experimentation and validation of assumptions. But how does this work in practice? How do you apply this both in product development and other project contexts?

In this tutorial, we start by identifying and prioritising assumptions standing between our product or solution idea and its success. Then, we discuss several experimentation and validation techniques that enable quick, cheap and reliable learning. Finally, we learn how to interpret the results and decide how to move forward.

Practical case examples and exercises bring theory to live during this tutorial.

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

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

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy visited NASA for the first time. During his tour of the facility, he met a janitor carrying a broom down the hallway. The President then casually asked the janitor what he did for NASA, and the janitor replied, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

“Line of Sight (LoS)” is how an individual sees how their role fits into the bigger picture-the thread that links people, teams, and organizations. When people have a clear line of sight, much like the janitor, they understand their company’s purpose and how their work contributes to business goals.

In this session, you will learn how to: 

• Create Line of Sight (LoS) models that connect the work done at lower levels of detail with a clear path to organizational outcomes.
• Verify capabilities are linked to clear means and ends to enable organizational transformation.
• Leverage open-source tools to document LoS models and use them as a part of analysis efforts.
• Identify sources of organizational conflict and provide leadership with analysis around risk and resource implications.

Participants will receive a workbook to help kick-start their LoS modeling and analysis efforts. 

Perhaps you’ve used Kanban in your organization; or you’ve used apps like Trello or Asana; or you’ve wondered whether the Kanban principles might help you get work done; or perhaps you’ve never heard of Kanban before! Regardless, if you’d like to understand the techniques and benefits of Kanban in a fun, interactive workshop, join this session! After a review of Kanban principles, we’ll dive right in. Each team will be asked to complete more tasks than seems possible in the allotted time – sound like real life? – and will then try again using Kanban techniques such as limiting the amount of work in progress, avoiding multitasking, and visualizing work in progress. One side benefit of Kanban that you’ll discover is a dramatic improvement in communications among all parties involved in the project. You will laugh and have fun with this board game simulation and will walk away with some new, some old, and some refreshed ideas about getting work done.

What’s the secret to successful projects and initiatives? Teamwork and effective collaboration, of course. BAs are often the glue that help teams work well together, facilitating workshops and creating a shared understanding on the outcomes required. It’s important to set up teams for success as well as implement continuous improvement processes to ensure difficulties are resolved. Team charters are commonly used for exactly that. However, some team charters are nothing more than a series of dot points containing generic ideas or vague statements.

The Team Collaboration Canvas is a new tool specifically designed to help BAs facilitate team chartering and retrospective sessions to create a shared vision, confirm working agreements, and support continuous improvement. It provides a simple method to capture the team’s ways of working along with team goals, ways to improve, and the context around the team. This session will explore the how to use the canvas to build awesome teams.

With all this talk about data strategy, should we care? What even is a data strategy? Where does one start? Why, when, and how should organizations go about it?

If these questions matter to you, don’t miss this tutorial! Let’s demystify data strategy, in simple relatable terms.

Tutorial attendees will receive a practical tool/template to use as part of the implementation journey of a larger thoughtful data strategy.

In today’s volatile world, business analysts are relied on to help teams deliver solutions that create an excellent user experience and customer delight. In the pursuit of innovation, BAs cannot rest on their laurels; what is ‘wow’ today is passé tomorrow. We must remain curious – researching, investigating and exploring – continuously learning as we go.

But ingrained attitudes, cognitive bias and assumptions can impede creativity and learning. We may think we know ‘something’ and so fail to deeply explore ‘what else’. While we may have facts and figures, we must remain open to discovering new information.

In this session, we will explore tools and techniques to develop an exploratory mindset. You will learn how to be more mindful to enable you to be objective and approach your work from an impartial position. By loosening our perceptions, we are able to see things with more clarity and openness. This drives investigation to gain deeper insights to deliver better business value.

It’s time we put the OWNER back into product ownership! As organizations shift to Agile DevOps and product delivery, many teams are hindered by product owners who operate by proxy, lack the empowerment and authority to manage products, and are under-supported to become stewards for their product or service.

Product Owners are the CEOs of their products or services. They are more than a role on a Scrum team or proxy for stakeholders. We need to stop reinforcing counterproductive behaviors in our organizations and rise as thought leaders.

Whether you want to become a product owner, are new to product ownership, becoming a product management thought leader, or leading a team of product owners, this session will help you define what it means to be a great product owner in your context and plot a path to get there. This workshop draws from multiple blueprints and workshops.

The case study focuses on how to implement knowledge management capabilities from scratch for long term sustainable results (taking the staircases instead of the lift). Attendees will learn the practical steps in implementing a robust knowledge management capability starting from a well defined business glossary to a google-like search capability for knowledge assets. They will also learn how to manage and balance the people, process, data and technology aspects focusing on what matters.

We are out of the pandemic.  Business leaders are refocusing their organizations on growth, alignment, digitalization, and efficiency.  Leaders and employees have been living through a never-ending environment of change/transformation while dealing with tremendous resource constraints.  We all heard about the “great resignation” and “quietly quitting.”  With the demand for change and talent, one capability that organizations need to excel at is knowledge management.  This presentation will help attendees to implement a knowledge capability that will enable their organizations to achieve change while dealing with their cultural disruption.  We will look at a strategic and operational framework for building a knowledge capability; and treating knowledge as a sustainable asset.

In the contemporary world of machine learning algorithms – “data is the new oil”. For the state-of-the-art ML algorithms to work their magic it’s important to lay a strong foundation with access to relevant data. Volumes of crude data are available on the web nowadays, and all we need are the skills to identify and extract meaningful datasets. This talk aims to present the power of the most fundamental aspect of Machine Learning – Dataset Curation, which often does not get its due limelight. It will also walk the audience through the process of constructing good quality datasets as done in formal settings with a simple hands-on Pythonic example. The goal is to institute the importance of data, especially in its worthy format, and the spell it casts on fabricating smart learning algorithms.

Astrid will be speaking about the journey of Business Rules Management at the SVB, the organization responsible for implementing the Dutch national insurance schemes. From the struggle for existence at the beginning, to providing an indispensable capability for future business and tech innovation. This journey hasn’t only been about delivering value-adding products based on high quality decision models. It encompassed much more: the organizations’ adoption of low-code, choosing tactical projects for the roadmap and overcoming skepticism about decision management automation. Astrid will identify the key drivers that have contributed to this success as well as the obstacles the team had to overcome.

Come board Southwest Airlines on a flight to see their BPM journey. Hear how the state of BPM evolved the past six years from simply “documenting processes” to becoming strategic process partners across their business and technology organizations.  See how the BPM capabilities at Southwest Airlines continue to expand in scope and scale, what has driven the increased interest and collaboration with various business areas, and what makes a successful BPM team.  You will also see how to evolve your BPM capabilities and apply them to small process improvement projects or large scale transformational initiatives.

Transforming your operating model is more than redesigning business processes.  Entirely new or matured capabilities may be required to enable the new business strategy. In this mini workshop, you’ll have a chance to learn and practice how to identify business capabilities, align them to a desired strategy, assess maturity, and build a map for enablement.

Asking targeted and probing questions and then actively listening to the answers are top key business analyst skills. During this session, we will review the power we have in questions and the reward we get in the answers. First, understanding the difference in the categories of questions available to us and how each results in different information in responses. Next, we evaluate the different ways we listen, with active listening and other techniques, to continue delving further or begin anew. Together we will practice several techniques and analyze how each benefits our work differently.

Are you a business analyst who wonders how you can use your business analysis capabilities to be competitive in the job market for the next 3 to 5 years?

As first noted back in 2017, product owner and product manager roles offer a viable career path for business analysts, especially those who currently work on custom software development projects.

Come to this session to learn about the similarities and differences between business analysis, product owner, and product manager roles. Then discover how you can apply your business analysis experience to becoming a product owner or product manager. Along the way, you’ll hear about the lessons others have learned from moving from business analysis through product owner to product management roles.

BAs tend to be natural communicators, but we’ve probably all experienced situations where stakeholders just don’t seem to listen.  Meetings are held, decisions are made, but a week later the same issues are raised yet again.  Why is this? Is it possible that sometimes we don’t make enough of an impact?

Communication, engagement and influence are key antidotes to this problem. In this practical presentation you’ll hear:

• How the trio of communication, engagement and influence are crucial
• The importance of understanding people, perspectives and outcomes
• How communicating facts alone isn’t enough: It’s all about the story…
• How engagement starts by being engaging

You’ll pick up a range of techniques and approaches that you can put straight into use.

Tired of hearing that Business Analysts are no longer needed on product teams? Frustrated that your organization’s evolution to a product based structure is de-valuing analysis functions and resources? Come join us as we share what America’s largest health insurer has done to evolve, drive, and promote a critical and irreplaceable functional skillset as it has moved ahead in this product evolution. Learn how building a community of resources who perform similar functions in the enterprise has achieved great learning opportunities, standardized standards and practices, and higher employee engagement. You will take away practical steps and knowledge to build a successful Center of Excellence targeted for resources that perform business and product analysis functions.

It’s no secret, despite 50 years of executing projects, the majority of projects fail! Over 75% of projects are over budget, behind schedule or don’t deliver expected benefits. So why do we continue using this failed paradigm? Leading organizations are transitioning away from projects to a product centric view of their work to help improve outcomes. We’ll use real-world examples to discuss: What these companies have done that others lack? Why these companies no longer run monolithic projects? What special skills these companies have with integration and software delivery? We’ll also discuss how effective business analysis, and specifically IIBA’s Guide to Product Ownership Analysis can help organizations move away from underperforming initiatives and deliver desired outcomes.

Part of our digital transformation at Loyalty NZ is changing the mindset around data. Our vision is for everyone to be fluent in the language of Loyalty data so that we can critically read, discuss, and make decisions with our data and take advantage of technological advances. We have invested in an organisation-wide data literacy programme so that we can safely move away from centralised data analysis toward self-service and wider access. This case study explores how we approached the design, delivery, and measurement of a pragmatic and tailored data literacy programme for our organisation of just under 150 people. We explore our approach to Role analysis and Data Topic selection and how these two come together to form the foundational framework for our data literacy programme. We explain how we have applied educational design techniques to the development of each of our literacy modules. And finally, we describe how we are implementing our data programme and measurement framework.

Decision models contribute significantly to the description of the requirements and the logic of operational business decisions. The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard allows automating these decisions. The current scope of decision support, however, is not limited to making the decision. It is also possible to explain the decision-making knowledge in a reliable, user-friendly way by answering various questions based on the explicit knowledge in the model.

This presentation illustrates how an automatic chatbot for DMN models can lead to explainable decisions and useful customer service, using natural language processing and various forms of reasoning. This gives business customers more transparency and trust in the decision process, without expensive and uneffective customer support.

What you will learn:

• Explainable decision models
• Automated customer services
• Effective communication of business decision knowledge

We can all agree that everyone wants better business performance. While there are many avenues to improvement – aligning end products and services to our customer needs, gaining actionable insights from analyzing reliable business data, and having a more knowledgeable team, are all worthy efforts to almost guaranteed improved performance. The challenge is that these and other improvement efforts span such vastly different domains, it is easy to overoptimize each area, and forget there is ultimately just one goal: enhance overall performance. Business Process discipline provides the foundation to synchronize and align all the individual components of the business, without losing track of the big picture, and the complex interdependencies that always exist. In this session, Sasha Aganova will introduce some key techniques that will help you become better at what you do and will provide critical factors to grow process maturity in your organization.

A Business Analyst, by nature of work, is often placed in a leadership role in a group or project team managing stakeholders; whether or not there are people formally reporting to them.

But what kind of leaders are Business Analysts? And does the Business Analyst work with stakeholders of the same kind of personalities, skill sets and backgrounds? So then is leadership a one size fits all approach or are there myriad flavors of leadership styles suited to specific category of stakeholders? What kinds of leadership styles are there and in which situations should Business Analysts exercise those leadership styles? 

In this presentation we consider two leadership models that could suit a specific type of Business Analysis task and/or stakeholder.  We revisit models that teach leaders to diagnose the needs of a situation, individual or a team and then use the appropriate leadership style to respond to the needs of the person and the situation.  In addition, this presentation will share

When you’re craving comfort food but the menu is focused on new wave fusion and gastro experimentation, your experience may be less than your expectation. Our goal with any product is to meet the needs of our customers, and to do that, we need to know who they are, what they want, and how they experience our product. Why stop there? We can use the customer journey to uncover the ingredient details that take an experience from home cook to a Michelin Star worthy experience. In this interactive session, we’ll  discover the recipe for understanding success as our customers see it and how to take that experience to the next level to generate requirements, find feature details and create amazing products.

As Business Analysts and change professionals we often need to explain ideas to our stakeholders. However, the reality is that you could have the best idea ever, but if you cannot communicate it in a way that makes people care, that idea will never take flight.

Whether we are presenting the case for change or explaining a complex problem, we need to move beyond death by PowerPoint and sleep-inducing documents and find a way to truly connect with our audience.

In this talk, we will explore how empathy and the power of stories can be used to create compelling explanations that are capable of transforming an audience.

I believe that anyone can become an effective presenter no matter their previous experiece with public speaking. That’s a bold statement but I make it based on working with thousands of speakers from all skill levels, industries and backgrounds. I simply don’t beieve that some people are given golden tongues at birth and others are destined to suffer from stage fright and anxiety. Speaking is a skill like any other and it can be learned and enjoyed by anyone. I guarantee that my presentation will give you practical techniques that you can apply immediately and see real results in your speaking skills. We’ll talk about your individuality and how it is your greatest gift as a speaker if you will only use it and stop trying to be perfect. We’ll talk about your “natural resources” — eye contact, body language, using your voice, pauses and smiles. We’ll discuss the power of storytelling and by the end of my talk you’ll be on your feet sharing a story from your life with a partner.

How do you stay ahead of your market? With the pace of technological advancement, new competitors in your market, and sentiment changes, your org needs to be prepared for thousands of unknowns. Build up the muscles to challenge the unknown with Innovation Management. Innovation Management is about the repeatable delivery of new and/or improved value. Innovating the Enterprise is about instilling best practices and developing the appropriate muscles as they relate to managing innovation.  Who do I see ultimately leading that charge? BUSINESS ANALYSTS!

This session will show Innovation Management in action via partner experiences, as well as shares insights captured in the ISO56000 series of standards for Innovation Management. This knowledge will help YOU to instill innovation and repeatability as you Innovate the Enterprise!

Business and data go hand in hand. In fact, you can’t successfully ‘do business analysis’ without talking about data. And you can’t successfully ‘do data’ without understanding its business context!

Join this session to learn:

• How to guide your business stakeholders to tell you what they are really looking for, which is not always as requested!
• What is the ‘business data purpose mindset’?
• Best of the best data principles and tools to strive for, in every project implementation.

Have you ever encountered any of these scenarios?

• How can I balance foundational and strategic capability needs?
• How can I build my product roadmap effectively if I don’t know what capabilities are available to me?
• How do I proactively account for the many dependencies and synergies at play? 
• How do I optimize investment in common needs and when does it makes sense to do so by solving for the capability gap at an enterprise level vs. one-off solution approaches?

The need to adapt quickly and understand internal capabilities (people, process, data, and technology) in order to advance products and services continues to be the critical bridge between strategy and execution.  Learn from a multi-discipline business architecture approach to understanding and advancing shared capabilities.   Learn from techniques that have been applied through a journey of grass roots and top down efforts to advance business architecture practices

Adaptive organizations are those that are designed to quickly adjust themselves by modifying their competencies, organizational structure and workflows, with the aim of responding to new challenges caused by changes in the market, emerging technologies or new economic scenarios. One of the main problems companies have is they still face this organizational complexity using techniques and approaches based on an obsolete management model.

In this talk we’ll identify the reasons that cause the need for change in organizations in a complex world, and show new design structures and governance models that can improve your organizations’ adaptability.

How do executives really think? What do they really want to hear from you? What are they really most concerned about? Come listen to this fireside chat with senior executives and get the inside view.

Are business users capable of creating their own reports and dashboards with very little training and if so, which business intelligence data platform do they prefer? 

These were the questions a local governments IT department set out to answer at the start of FY 2020.  The vision was to enable business units to improve citizen transparency and make evidence-based decisions by making organizational data discoverable and accessible and putting it in the hands of the people who needed it when they needed it. 

In this session, we will discuss how approaching the project as a cultural change as opposed to a technological change was a key factor in its success.  We’ll also discuss how the idea was pitched to upper management, how the decision on which BI platform to purchase was put in the business user’s hands and how this fostered an inclusive environment where employees at all levels of the organization were excited to get involved and see what they could create.

“Because that’s how we’ve always done it” These are the words that keep good companies from becoming great, and puts bad companies out of business. In fact, in most businesses, if you aren’t practicing improvement and innovation… if you aren’t transforming, you’re dying. But what if that company is large and archaic? One that is unwilling or unable to make change? One that relies on how things have always been done?

In this session we’ll uncover tips and tricks for you to take back to your organizations, to start them down the path of process improvement, leading to new growth and innovation.

It’s time to rethink how, where, and why we all work. It’s time to think differently about the potential of your people, and what they need to be more productive, and create more value. Eric Hoffer sums it up best, “In times of change, the learners will inherit the earth, while the learned will live in a world that no longer exists.”

This presentation is intended to help you, and your organization, think more critically about the future multi – generational workforce, mentally and emotionally manage change and provide you a blue print for how to leverage your people power during this unprecedented change moment.

See if this sounds familiar – there is a request for a business analyst for an important organizational initiative, but there are no BA’s available. How do you succeed when there is more project analysis work than there are trained business analysts? Expanding the team often isn’t an option.  Do you limit the number of projects and miss potential opportunities for your organization, or move forward without a business analyst and risk less than desirable results due to poor requirement definition? 

What if you could utilize your BA best practices without having a BA on every project? By implementing a community of practice that expands beyond your current BA team, you can expand your analysis capacity.

I’ll discuss how to develop a business analysis community of practice that reaches beyond the business analysts – allowing you to increase the number of projects producing effective analysis and requirements and allowing you the chance to develop a pipeline of BA talent.

MVPs are often used as a way to chunk up our full feature scope into manageable parts that we can implement one step at a time. This approach does not really help us much in deciding what should be in scope or out of scope, and what should be high priority or low priority.

The true power of MVPs is facilitating fast learning. Will our proposed solution actually bring the business impact and value we think it will? What assumptions need to be true to achieve this impact? At any point in time, should we continue, fine-tune, pivot or stop?

This talk will:

• introduce MVPs as minimal validations rather than feature sets;
• offer some examples of techniques to identify and prioritise assumptions and validate them;
• demonstrate we should not design the version of a product we can go live with upfront, but rather give ourselves the freedom to stumble upon it during a series of deliberate experiments.

Join Filip and rethink scope as something to be discovered rather than defined!

When seeing data problems, the most obvious solutions are technical. Do we have good tools? Architecture? Clean pipelines? But what if the problems are people related – they’re unwilling to use the data, they don’t trust it, and different people use it differently? It is important to focus not only on the technical data issues, but also the Data Culture.

Data Culture is the way that people in your organization view and interact with data. Do they trust data? Is it a nuisance that they deal with? Is it something management wishes was used more often, but mostly neglected? Do they turn to it when making decisions?

This presentation will show a roadmap to getting from a culture that is distrustful of its data to one that uses it to drive decisions. Culture work is not a magic bullet, but a slow and steady march towards improving peoples’ relationship with data. We will discuss how to assess your own data culture, timelines, steps, and signs that your efforts are yielding results.

This presentation provides a case study of an organization amid its digital transformation journey. The presenters will demonstrate how to use architecture to identify ambiguity around business data and turn it into digital transformation opportunities. Further discussion will show how line-of-sight models illustrate how organizational capabilities are resourced and support strategic enterprise outcomes.

This presentation discusses the institutionalization of architecture across the enterprise. The presentation of example architectures shows their development and how to brief stakeholders and senior leaders.

The world has changed in dramatic ways, impacting both the work we do and how we do it.This presentation discusses the changing nature of our work and how that impacts the way we create products for our customers. In essences, new rules for product success. We’ll demonstrate how you can use IIBA’s Guide to Product Ownership Analysis to help your teams create the foundation for success. Plus, we’ll identify concrete ways in which you can effectively use business analysis techniques to deliver successful products that exceed expectations.

Learning Objectives:

• Join us to hear about recent developments and our insights based on real-world experience as we discuss:
• How to leverage new rules for product success
• The need for product ownership analysis skills
• Using high-impact business analysis techniques to create great products

The key to successful data visualization is context. Charts and graphs on a BI dashboard are great, but without context you’re likely to miss key insights. For example, the red bars on a hospital’s environmental monitoring dashboard may alert you that a problem exists, but when you can click the red bars and see the exact location of the problem on a floor plan, you can develop an immediate response. Similarly, when a dashboard includes a network diagram that shows real-time server status and you can click a failed server to see the data required to initiate a fix, you’re two steps ahead. How do you achieve this level of insight? One easy way is to embed a Visio diagram in a Power BI report. This session features live demonstrations of two business cases for a theme park operator. Both have the same goal: getting data into the hands of frontline workers in an easy-to-use visual format. You probably don’t manage a theme park, but you probably do need to visualize data more effectively.

Business Process Management and Organizational Change Management are mature disciplines.  Too often process practitioners, fail to recognize the value and power of combining the two.  Process improvement failures too often get blamed on people and/or technology.  The real failure is lack of proper planning and equipping for the inevitable change that come with process improvement.  The best process designs, enabled by the coolest technologies fail to ‘stick’.

See how a structured, disciplined and combined approach to Business Process Management and Organizational Change Management can greatly mitigate the risk of failure, and why both disciplines should be core components of any process improvement initiative.

As we grow in our careers, it becomes easier to bring your true self to the workplace, and to understand the value of our human touch.  In this interactive lightning round, Women in Technology members will share some of the lessons learned over the years about the impact of being human in the workplace.  What happened, what did we learn, and what did it mean for ourselves and our careers?

Tactical focus is a requirement for most product management folks. Value-based product development enables product teams create the most value for the least effort. New and game-changing ideas are evaluated against strategic goals, cost/effort to develop and customer needs, and it puts assessing both customer and business value at the center of product-related decisions, whilst measuring what was ultimately achieved. Good product teams tend to follow value-based product development approach when evaluating individual features and choosing what to prioritize on the product roadmap next.

Do you want to learn how to first settle on value metrics that can be used consistently to vet what gets built and understand performance and key results before speccing out requirements? Join Oluwabori as he shares from an 18-month project experience on how to estimate value during idea management and early concepting, refine during feature scoping, and measuring the actual value upon release.

Albert Einstein has been quoted as saying, “Not everything that counts can be counted, & not everything that can be counted counts.” Whether Einstein actually said this or not, he certainly embodied the sentiment by recognizing the value of using data to drive decisions. In fact, recent studies have estimated that more data was created in a single minute in 2021 than data created during Einstein’s entire life. How can all that data be put to use? Should it be driving decision-making? To that point, in a 2018 Forrester survey of more than 1000 US companies, 91% said that data-driven decision-making was important to their business, while only 57% said they actually used data to make decisions in their business. How do we bridge this gap? How do we get from being in data denial to being data driven? This session will answer those questions & much more. Come see the relevance of the four V’s  of big data. Discover three types of cognitive biases and how they are the enemies of opportunity.

In this session, we document the journey of the Business Architecture team at MassMutual who leveraged their expertise in both capability management excellence and human capital to drive ownership, action, and ROI in 3 key projects: A single product launch, upskilling an enabling function, and reimaging the product launch journey across the enterprise.

Attendees will learn which frameworks and tools were evolved, combined and applied, how those were received by senior leaders and business partners and where the team succeeded, failed, and learned. Attendees will also learn how to lead meaningful transformations, ensure Business Architecture artifacts are actually leveraged to make in-flight decisions, and drive transparency across complex organizational models.

Humanity isn’t just kindness; it’s about how we relate to the people and the world around us.  Humanity as a job skill is underrated, but increasingly important in today’s workplaces.  The ability to make connections, communicate across styles and cultures, encourage diverse perspectives, and to model balance are soft skills that can raise productivity and increase customer-centricity.  In this session, we’ll break into smaller groups to discuss how we can identify and grow our human skills and to communicate how they add value to your organization.

This is a business transformation case study on a Pharma company acquisition that had everything that could go wrong did within the first 6 months of post-integration. The case study will cover the process based approach to merger integration with special focus on core processes and core skills with emphasis on people during the transformation. Will cover enterprise alignment, governance, prioritizing and measuring what matters to create value.

Organizations have been budgeting more money into data tooling including moving their data stacks to the cloud and investing money in data analytics and engineering talent. While the data stack modernization movement has been moving full steam ahead, how much of the effort has really resulted in making the right data available to answer some key business questions? The objective of the session is to discuss the different phases of the Data Value Chain, where the gaps are in that chain and some tips for avoiding common pitfalls. For business leadership and Data product managers, getting back to the basics of what questions are organizations trying to answer, what raw data sources do we have (Data producers) and establishing the organization’s Data domains are critical steps for identifying data that can be transformed into valuable insights for an organization as well as utilizing your organization’s data to improve user experiences.

Business architecture models an entire organization to show how strategic intent is met and business transformation efforts are executed.  Central to any business architecture framework is effectively addressing different perspectives and their convergences.  Getting the design of the business right eases pain in both current business operations and future changes, however, stakeholders’ acceptance of the value of business architecture can be hard to come by.  In this presentation, we will share our business architecture journey with two very different companies:  one who saw the relevance right away and one who gave them the cold shoulder

How can we remain nimble while securing our organizations from existential threats? Today, business leaders must adopt new strategies to take into consideration emerging threats like climate change, global pandemics, cyberthreats, uncertain financial conditions, and now – nuclear war!? This session aims to foster awareness of intangible threats while focusing on tangible risks and opportunities to protect our organization’s data, systems and people. The session will draw upon our experiences, academic research, and out-of-the-box thinking on how existential threats impact our organizational strategic approach, and with that, we’ll offer some business analysis techniques that may help you generate more creative ideas to solve complex problems. 

Building a product-focused capability, shifting away from reactive delivery and putting laser focus on customer empathy, is a complex change journey. In this presentation, you’ll learn how Liberty Mutual has been making that shift, the successes and challenges, so you can learn from what we’ve learned and optimize how you operate to delivery strong product experiences. A few areas we’ll discuss:

• Building the *right* thing: Using leading and lagging indicators to ensure what you build is what your customers need while also gathering regular feedback through direct interviews as well as analytics
• Building the thing *right*: It’s not enough to just build something, it needs to be built with quality, stability, security, performance and other implicit expectations in mind

You’ll walk away with insights from a complex, global company and see how Liberty Mutual used experimentation to drive a global operating change.

In the Dutch psyche exists a drive to organize and battle the sea, and more in general dealing with the increasing demands on infrastructure in this small but highly populated area. Ever since the 70s the Dutch researched data, structures and communication. In this session you will learn how the Dutch Railway applies Fact Oriented Modeling at its core of answering to the call of becoming Data Driven to allow it to build better, faster and more efficient infrastructure.

Nowadays, we hear that one of the conditions for companies to become nimble and build products effectively is collaboration. To build the right things correctly, we need cross-functional teams working together to achieve the same goal.

Easy to say, hard to implement? Right?

I observe that building diverse teams is quite often a weak point during strategy implementation.

So, how to make it work?

It is not enough to just tell people from different departments like customer service, marketing, operations and development: please, come and work together. They have different ways of working, habits, functional leads, and even tools they use for task planning. A leader’s facilitation is crucial. But how exactly do we make it work?

I will share some case studies from my experience of what works and what does not when I organize cross-functional teams to make them work towards the same goal. 

Only real practical examples from my experience of building cross-functional teams!

This session will provide the opportunity to apply simple yet powerful techniques as they are discussed!

With communication and collaboration being key to project delivery and organisational success, how we behave as Business Analysts is more important than ever. The BA role has two sides, what we do and how we do it. We must master both of these to become great BAs. Self-awareness is critical to becoming a great BA, but what is it and how do we improve it? In this session we will look at the common behaviour traps we can fall into as BAs, and find tools within our BA tool-kit that can facilitate self-reflection and improve self-awareness.

Key Takeaways:

• – The purpose and power of retrospectives.
• –  Retrospective and reflection techniques which can be used to increase self-awareness.
• – Become a great BA by focusing on your behaviours.

In this session, we will present a combination of symbolic AI and non-symbolic AI reasoning techniques to ease the burden on knowledge workers by offering intelligent just-in-time assistance. This approach is based on open international workflow and decision standards and anchored on the low-code Friendly Enough Expression Language (FEEL) from the Decision Model and Notation (DMN). We use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to enable knowledge-based workflows based on unstructured communications using unstructured data. NLU detection, mediated by decision models of email-created events triggers the flow of knowledge work, detects intermediate business events, route attachments and results for approval or exceptions, and provides useful information to knowledge workers, including calendar events, contacts, and various reports.  A Real Estate Closing Process will be used as an example.

The Digital transformation of businesses has led to numerous customer touchpoints, opportunities, and channel of communication for interaction with business. The pandemic has changed the way we operate – remote working has become a norm. We have curated a intuitive customer journey framework comprising of 6 different stages that start with Analysis, building personas, identifying touchpoints, conducting workshops, documenting pain points along with continuous monitoring.

We bring our experience on how BAs can leverage best practices and play a key role in creating an empathy map, journey map, running remote workshops, using varied tools across stages along with avoiding common pitfalls such as inherent biases. The framework that have we put together will help BAs conduct seamless workshops virtually and streamline the creation and maintenance of Customer Journey maps, thus helping organizations to understand their customers better and provide enhanced CX.

In many companies, Executives cling to the organizational chart as if it holds a set of magic keys to success. We play a game of chess, moving pieces around and employing some poor soul to edit that box and line graph a hundred times a year. We hastily point to the clear lines to argue when a department “needs to learn to stay in their lane.” But what if this reliance is the cause of an unstable, crumbling foundation? What if the battle for proactive, controlled, and continuous improvement with sustainable success is only a battle because of the structure we have set? Organizationas pursuing a process-centric operational methodology must deconstruct the functional org chart – after all, it’s anything but funcitonal. Here’s why every organization today must operate as a matrix-based organization to achieve sustainable success.

Imagine a time before the Food Network, before Hello Fresh and Blue Apron, before Uber Eats and Grub Hub.  Imagine that children helped their parents prepare meals by prepping vegetables, stirring pots on stoves, taking pans out of the oven once the time dinged, and setting the dining table.  Very real risk of injury existed there.  In 1963, the world was introduced to the very first Easy Bake Oven by Kenner Products in Cincinnati, Ohio, a child’s toy designed to look like a conventional oven and inspire children to bake real edible and tasty food.  Fast forward to the post-pandemic world of 2023, where security breaches and ransomware attacks abound.  An organization needs a strong information security program to defend itself against threats while remaining compliant with privacy laws and regulations. Using the analogy of the Classic Easy Bake Oven, Joy Toney makes the application of information security and privacy best practices to product design easy, fun, and digestible.

The presentation will discuss development of data management strategy for IMF’s Corporate Services Department. The project addressed several challenges that the Department was experiencing at the time, for example: (1) storage of data in various enterprise and specialized applications; (2) lack of data integration and interconnectivity, (3) inconsistent data analysis process and (4) lack of standard data governance and approach for data management and visualization.

The strategy was developed to address the above issues so that the Department was able to focus on better utilization of financial and operational data to enhance the service delivery, facilitate data-driven decision making, and enable efficient allocation of Department’s resources. The project also identified ways to enhance Department’s capabilities to visualize and analyze data, created governance and standards to better manage and utilize data and built roadmap and implementation plan towards mature use of data.

Ultimate Business Decision Modeling tools should support the following situation: a business analyst (subject matter expert) defines a business problem, and a smart decision engine solves the problem by finding the best possible decision. Such declarative decision modeling assumes that a business user specifies WHAT TO DO and a decision engine figures out HOW TO DO it. This is quite opposite to the Procedural approach frequently used in traditional programming.

Rules-based products made dramatic progress in this direction in the last 20 years giving control over business logic to business people. However, they still frequently force them to define HOW to come up with a good decision. Modern business rules products (rule engines) should become much smarter.

This presentation we will present a new practical approach that utilizes a combination of a rule engine and an off-the-shelf constraint solver and will demonstrate how it works by building a few declarative decision models.