2020 Agenda Announced!

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!

The word ‘value’ is right in the definition of business analysis. Product managers strive to create valuable products. Agile leaders tell you that the goal of their methods is to maximize business value. But even so, many project and product teams struggle to understand how and whether their work matters. The massive upheavals we’ve seen in 2020 make it even more critical to be able to define and deliver on value.

This workshop will help you understand how to define business value in actionable terms, the different forms that value can take, and how to assess your progress toward value creation.

Learning Objectives:

• Apply value models such as jobs-to-be-done, user behaviour changes and OKRs
• Identify customer, business and stakeholder value and resolve conflicts between them
• Use financial, functional, social and emotional value concepts to help stakeholders make better decisions

Digital is rapidly transforming the nature of work across industries. Tomorrow’s organizations won’t have much need for paper-shufflers or button clickers. They’ll need agile talent who can adapt quickly to evolving technologies, customer needs, and business realities. They’ll need creative minds to solve the problems that computers cannot tackle. And they’ll need people with the emotional intelligence to collaborate and build sustainable relationships with colleagues, customers, and suppliers.

This tutorial focuses on the people and process skills needed for digital success, how attendees can cultivate them within their teams, and how to apply the skills to digital projects. Key competencies include creativity, strategic problem solving, communication and consultative skills, collaboration, change management, and the ability to translate between IT and the business. Conversations will emphasize ways to use mentoring, communities of practice, and other peer-based learning approaches to transfer in-demand skills in the flow of work.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Recognize the people and process skills most needed for digital success
• Understand how peer-based learning techniques can help teams build these skills
• Learn when and how the skills are best applied in the context of digital projects

Digital transformations require a different way of thinking. In this new world it isn’t about the organization at all, It’s hyper-focused on the customers’ needs and wants. To be successful, we must think from the outside in, rather than the inside out. Business models that have served for ages are being reimagined and it takes new skills, competencies and even a new mindset to make the switch.

In this workshop, we’ll delve into the competencies required for business analysts to succeed in the digital age while tackling a case study to learn how to apply business analysis tools and techniques.

Learning objectives:

• Understand the key differences between traditional and digital business analysis
• Learn how to apply the digital business analysis best practices
• Get an appreciation for competencies needed to execute digital engagements
• Apply tools and techniques from the BABOK® Guide effectively in a digital 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

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

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

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

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

What Attendees Will Learn:

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

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

The Essential Facilitation Skills:

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

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

Upon completion, attendees will be able to:

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

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

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

In this session you will learn how to:

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

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

Learning Objectives:

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

This session defines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cloud technologies are powering the emergence of Intelligent Ecosystems that are reshaping entire industries.

Organizations are accelerating digital transformation at a more rapid pace in this world being reshaped by a pandemic.  AI is injecting intelligence and learning in software systems.  Container  technologies like Docker & Kubernetes are making it easy to develop  intelligent applications as Services once and deploy them on premises in your data center or in any Cloud, so you can scale technologies to millions and billions of users. Add the challenges of data privacy, security and regulations that varies around the world and you have many hurdles to overcome

In this tutorial we will see how teams of human experts and AI systems (made up of people, robots, cognitive agents and applications) will effectively collaborate to solve business and technical problems that are impossible or impractical to grapple with today.  While terms like Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Systems have begun to appear frequently, they are not always well defined.  We will start by defining these concepts, how they are related and how they can be used as building blocks of future AI systems. We will also define how Automation, Data & AI can be used collaboratively to deliver secure applications at scale using Cloud and Container technologies with major parts of our world collaborating remotely due to the pandemic.

We will define containers and container orchestration technologies which are increasingly the choice of developers and data scientists who like to make their AI and ML  capabilities widely used in a data center on the edge and in any cloud.  If you come up with a great idea and would like to scale it in your organization, country or any where in the world, use of containers is a great way to augment and scale your innovation and intelligence baked into software and business processes.

We will use the motivating examples from Insurance, Banking and Healthcare to illustrate how AI, Cloud & Container  technologies will help us scale and speed up delivering better business capability to individual companies and network of collaborating companies.

Developing systems of this scale means you have to design with scalability, reliability and regulatory compliance in mind.  We will conclude this session with a vision of how IBM is advancing the concept of a ‘œRegulated Cloud’ using the IBM Cloud for Financial Services so that enterprise developers, Software and SaaS vendors and Systems Integrators can collaborate to develop scalable intelligent applications  that can enable data driven businesses while  protecting data and better managing  risk.

Have you ever found yourself working as part of a large program with a lot of activity but not much progress? It could be rewriting a 20 year old system, customizing a COTS application, or building a data warehouse.

You may have been told that adopting agile approaches will help you deliver those types of efforts better, faster, and cheaper. You may have also found out that it’s not quite that simple. If you make your delivery process more efficient, you may just be delivering the wrong solution to the wrong problem faster.

Join Kent McDonald to find out a practical and effective approach to discern if you’re solving the right problem, and discover the right product to address that problem. You’ll learn how to structure your next project to:

*Identify the problem you’re trying to solve

*Make sure the problem is worth solving

*Iteratively discover the right product to solve that problem.

Along the way you’ll learn about and practice a collection of simple techniques that you can use right away.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• How to use a problem statement to help your team understand the problem you’re trying to solve and determine if it’s worth solving
• How to use decision filters and story maps to guide your efforts to discover the right product
• How to use backlog refinement techniques to build a shared understanding of your product

Going Deep: Lessons Learned in action on Creative, Practical and Effective Business Analysis Techniques for Tomorrow’s Analysts!

Jamie loves to introduce us to the more creative (and fun!) side of some of the most common business analysis techniques.  But HOW do you really do those?  Whether you have seen some of these before, let’s take a few of those most common analysis techniques and dive in deep on how to be successful in our wild and crazy world today!

Let’s not only learn creative ways to get our work done, but let’s have some fun!  We’re going to look at tried-and-true techniques and not talk but SHOW you how to do them on virtual teams.  Let’s get our hands dirty and learn how to navigate digital transformations and the rapid changing technology around us while still driving our companies forward.  Come spend the time to dive deep on how you can use data to inform the decisions that drives results in the same speed our data is moving!  Let’s get ourselves ready for tomorrow and beyond by learning how to approach our favorite techniques!

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Identify key activities to make analysis techniques successful in virtual environments
• Walk through creative approaches that embrace our digital transformations
• Explore how data can be leveraged to help us keep our pace with today’s changing world”     

It’s become a cliche to say ‘data is an asset’. Roles such as VP or Director of Data & Analytics have been elevated to mean more than managing a DW and increasingly organizations hire into the role of Chief Data Officer (CDO), typically expecting it to fix all their data issues.But what does it really mean to say ‘data is an asset’? Is it about cutting edge technologies and implementing data lakes? Why do we even care? And what would it take to actually materialize treating ‘data as an asset’? Especially in seasoned organizations already well-set in their ways, where organizational culture recognizes functions like supply chain, sales, or finance as indisputable business assets, data not so much!This session will address the above questions and share a comprehensive Enterprise Information Management (EIM) framework that depicts all the components to consider when embarking on a journey to treat ‘data as an asset’; emphasis will also be given to the key areas to prioritize on, for increased chances of program success.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• What is ‘data is an asset’ and why it matters?
• Enterprise Information Management (EIM) framework to start addressing data challenges, regardless the industry you’re in
• Key tenets to prioritize and focus on
• Exercise to strengthen understanding of some of the concepts/tools presented

Participants in this innovative and creative tutorial walk away with a pragmatic approach to analysis, discovery, and use of effective process KPIs – a necessary tool for sustained business agility.

Why is process performance measurement both an obvious requirement and commonly absent management tool? If we aren’t measuring process performance, we aren’t managing processes, and we can’t know if we are improving them. We need practical process performance measurement so, firstly, we can decide which processes need improving and, secondly, know if improvements are being realized.

Drawing on many real-life examples this interactive tutorial provides a simplified and effective method for discovery of process KPIs. Participants get plenty of practical experience through group exercises. Bring your own process KPI challenges to the KPI Klinik part of the tutorial and we’ll help you to solve them.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• The vital role of process performance measurement
• How to discover process KPIs
• The characteristics of a good process KPI
• The importance of the KPI measurement method
• Sorting the critical few from the important many
• Pitfalls in setting performance targets

In this workshop, participants will conduct a Cybersecurity Threat and Risk Assessment on an example application. It will begin with an explanation of the Threat and Risk Assessment: what it is, its purpose, benefits, inputs and outputs, and the importance of having supporting governance and processes.

Participants will learn 

• Where Threat and Risk Assessment fits in the software/solution development and delivery life cycle
• What information is required 
• Which stakeholders should be engaged at each stage 
• How building-in cyber security controls throughout development vs. adding it on:
  • increases the effectiveness of the controls, and
  • reduces costs associated with latent redesign, redevelopment and potentially re-deployment.

As the group carries out the Threat Risk Assessment exercise, considerations such as the role of business analyst, potential challenges along the way, and the importance of frequent and transparent collaboration will be woven throughout the session.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Understand what a solution-level cybersecurity risk assessment is
• Understand how cybersecurity is built into solutions, not bolted on
• Understand which inputs are required and which stakeholders to engage
• Understand how risks can be mitigated, and residual risks managed
• Be able to facilitate or contribute to a Threat and Risk Assessment

The number of digital solutions and apps is growing exponentially. We created this workshop to present a tool, which is time efficient, money saving and proven on real projects. It was designed to help companies to combine creative ideas and new technologies and with catalyze with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® to allows the users to easily innovate ideas, incorporate ultimate technologies, rethink customer experience and support their business decision making about further development. The workshop will demonstrate this method with LEGO® bricks, so participants will have a hands-on experience with the Canvas and LSP method, which will simultaneously work together in order to create the best digital solution. Solution Design Canvas was created to Ignite Business Agility and allows business to respond rapidly and flexibly to customer demands and adapt and lead change (of product or service, of organization itself) in a productive and cost-effective way without compromising quality of the service or product.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• How to establish Business Agility in practice
• Digital Solution Design
• How to gather change requirements   

Agile project participants report great difficulty getting user stories right, despite their seeming simplicity.  Much of supposed expert guidance actually aggravates issues, with each “expert” offering inconsistent and incorrect examples that take content for granted while focusing on superficialities and buzzword platitudes.     

This interactive workshop reveals seldom-recognized reasons Agile user stories fall short, explains critical concepts needed for effectiveness, and uses a real case to provide participants guided practice applying powerful proven special methods for identifying, writing, and evaluating Agile user stories that truly provide needed business value outcomes that so much conventional training purports yet fails to produce.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Recognize why Agile projects encounter such difficulties getting user stories right
• Get hands-on guided practice applying special methods that overcome difficulties
• Write right Agile user stories that truly deliver needed business value outcomes

Data modeling is about understanding the data used within our operational and analytics processes, documenting this knowledge in a precise form called the “data model”, and then validating this knowledge through communications with both business and IT stakeholders. Underlying all successful applications is a robust and precise data model, and similarly, most software development failures are due to a lack of understanding of the data or data requirements.

A data model is therefore an essential part of applications development including forward engineering, reverse engineering, and integration efforts. Forward engineering means focusing on business requirements, whereas reverse engineering means modeling existing systems to drive the support, replacement, or customization of applications. Integration projects such as business intelligence efforts, data lakes, and master data initiatives, require a consistent holistic view of concepts such as Customer, Account, and Product.

Assuming no prior knowledge of data modeling, we start off this workshop with an exercise that will illustrate why data models are essential to understanding business processes and business requirements. Then we explain core data modeling concepts and terminology. Next we introduce the three different levels of modeling (conceptual, logical, and physical), and explain the purpose of each level along with illustrating the dependencies between the models with examples.

You will learn:

• The value of data modeling as a precise communication tool.
• How to use each data modeling component, such as entities, relationships, and attributes.
• Where conceptual, logical, and physical data models are useful and the characteristics of each of these models.

You’ve been delivering a highly regarded workshop for a while now. Or you’ve just developed a new program and planned to present it live for the first time. During the workshop you rely heavily on whiteboards and poster paper. There might be a few hundred sticky notes involved. Workshop participants break out into small groups periodically, draw and write on poster sheets, then need to report back to the larger group. The only problem is that you now need to conduct the workshop remotely and you have one week to prepare! Learn what worked for one long-time instructor who turned a live, two-day workshop into a successful virtual workshop in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our world is forever changed. Countries, companies and communities across the world must find new ways to keep business and society going. Innovation is the bridge to overcome some of the greatest challenges that we are facing together. The future will now look different, and the potential for positive change is immense. 

To survive and thrive in the “next normal”, we must embrace innovation. While obvious to everyone, it’s easier said than done. Innovation is the thing that every leader demands, yet many don’t understand what it is and how to enable it. Many organizations maintain the status quo by “celebrating” innovation, instead of truly welcoming it. 

Together we will explore trends and best practices to enable pragmatic innovation in your organization. Prepare for an unconventional keynote that will empower you to transform your organization and your team.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand critical societal and technological transformations we can’t ignore
•  Future-proof your organization by following key innovation principles
• Understand critical innovation metrics

In 2015 Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG) began using agile within the brand and marketing organization to help hotel interior and exterior design initiatives move faster. The transformation from traditional project management to agile ways of working was a tectonic shift to the culture at IHG and has vastly improved design innovations, guest experiences and owner relations. This session will cover the successes and challenges of using agile in non-software initiatives to iteratively innovate and build new brands, rapid prototype design concepts and fail fast testing of potential solutions to maximize the impact of IHG’s brands, marketing and hotel design efforts. Come learn and take away the concepts we used to increased time to market for hotel construction and design efforts using the value of agile philosophies and methods.

Attendees Will Learn About:

• Non-software agility
• Brand development using agile
• Agile ways of working transformation

The Product Owner role has become a popular path for many Business Analysts and is vital for achieving business agility. But would you give a chain saw and a block of wood to a colleague and ask them to create an awesome sculpture?  No! Similarly, unleashing a Product Owner without the right mind-set can be destructive to teams and products.

Join Pardeep (aka Paddy) Dhanda, for an immersive hands on session, where he will present some of his biggest Product Owner failures and lessons learnt spanning across multiple industries including, Telecommunications, Banking and Government with a combined budget of over £2 billion.

Pardeep will also introduce thought-leadership on Lean Product Ownership – the mind-set required to overcome everyday challenges!

Learning Objectives:

• Learn about Product Owner anti-patterns that almost led to a total loss of over £2 billion
• The introduction of the Lean Product Ownership framework
• How Business Analysts can build an effective Product Ownership mind-set

Are rules part of your business analysis methodology? If not, you’re missing a big bet. Here’s how you can ensure your requirements meet business objectives, and increase the value, speed and effectiveness of your requirements practices.

Every professional wants to delight customers, add real value to projects, and make themselves indispensable to their organizations. By engaging with policies and rules, you can ask the right questions at the right time, get to the very heart of complex problems, and elevate your profile in projects and the organization. At the same time, you can reduce rework and dramatically improve communication and shared understanding.

Find out what you’re missing by not exploiting rules to their fullest.

·      Rules and the matter of correctness

·      Policy busting

·      Analyzing decisions using question charts

This case study explores how we increased business agility by empowering the business to manage their own rules and decisions. We’ll explore our journey, discuss common mistakes and lessons learned. We’ll share with you the 3 simple rules that enabled us to move from business rules being buried in complex code, scattered documents and the more valuable rules from employee brains:  to rules being centralized , automated and mostly importantly being owned by the business people accountable for them.

We’ll focus on our approach to standards, governance and enterprise sustainability. As well as discuss how we engaged the business to document the rules, build a concept model and take hands on ownership for testing and sign off of the rules.

Learning Objectives:

• Business Agility through Business Empowerment
• Implementing Enterprise Level Decision Automation
• Enabling business ownership of decisions
• How to build business driven rules
• Decision implementation standards and process
• Technology and business ownership perspective

True digital transformation is not a one-and-done acquisition of new technology. It’s about building the strategies and skillsets that enable an organization to continuously leverage technology for competitive advantage. However, many organizations are struggling to move beyond discrete technology projects to manage digital work enterprise-wide. And many process teams are trying to figure out their role in digital, including how they can incorporate new technologies for continuous improvement while using emergent technology to reinforce their strategic value.

In this session, participants will learn – Four challenges organizations face in framing digital work; Best practices for overcoming those challenges; Process’ role in the digital landscape; How successful process teams have applied best practices to their digital initiatives

Learning Objectives:

• Identifying the top challenges in integrating digital work
• Learning more about best practices for framing digital work
• Understanding process’ role in digital efforts

We dreamed of becoming Strategic Business Analysts. The day has come. 800 employees, aviation industry, 3 cultures. We felt excitement, and respect. Will it be enough – our experience, analytical skills, and yet strong believe it has to succeed? One more condition. We had to align with ongoing agile transformation.
Listen how we began with Strategic Business Analysis in Lufthansa Systems. How we were working with agility coaches, scrum masters, and various stakeholders to transform the company towards agility. How we implemented e.g. OKR framework to support strategy implementation.

Grasp our case study from the last 2 years to know our struggles, and lessons learned. Avoid our mistakes. Use our hints. How to conduct culture shifts, implement improvements, and affect 800 people effectively?

We’ve tried so many approaches. We hit the wall many times. We were loosing optimism which seemed to be limitless before. But we’ve met great people and techniques which kept us on the way. Eventually, we discovered signals that we are succeeding.

Learning Objectives:

• How to start with strategic business analysis
• Agile Transformation – how to support it with BA skills
• Lessons Learned – use our mistakes and hint
• OKRs – how they support strategy implementation
• How to grasp 800 employees with your actions
• Techniques that proved to be useful

Decisions have proven to be a core component of an enterprise digital transformation. It is important to note that digital decisions – along with machine learning and mathematical optimization – are keys to realizing artificial intelligence. The vast amount of data available – particularly in mortgage lending – makes this an exciting area of exploration. However, it must be approached judiciously.

In this presentation we present the concept of a decision framework for sensibly enabling machine learning in the enterprise in three key areas:
1. Construction of a permissible use and compliance process that ensures data and predictive models created from that data are properly vetted across numerous constraints.
2. Development of a human and machine hybrid model of boundary rules to assure proper use of data and predictive models – an “enforcement level” of decisions.
3. Establishing a foundation for explainable AI using decisions. 
This framework will be discussed using numerous examples relevant to financial services and lending.

Learning Objectives:

• Application of Decisions to Machine Learning
• Approaches to Explainable AI
• Use of Augmented AI

Business Agility is a hot topic, but did you know that leveraging Business Architecture can improve your ability to deliver on Business Agility objectives? Jo will use real-world examples to walk through how Business Architecture enables companies to address key drivers of Business Agility such as customer focus, lean decision-making, technology agility, and metrics.  The presentation will start with brief explanations of key Business Architecture and Business Agility concepts, then move quickly to real-world examples and interactive discussion.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand key concepts of Business Architecture and Business Agility
• Understand how applying Business Architecture drives better-informed decision-making
• Connect concepts and practices to real-world examples

This session will take my experience from the Military and equate it to today’s Product Owner.  What can we learn from how our military trains for and executes to ensure mission readiness.  Choosing your Battles, Conflict and Change Present Opportunity.  Timing is Critical and many more. Our military takes Agile to a whole new level.  We train our officers to make decisions in the heat of battle and that is what you as a product owner must do.  You must deal with a multitude of stakeholders, executive sponsors and developers who will be vying for your time and looking to you to make a decision.  When you step up and Carry The Flag for your Product you are leading the charge to delivering an exceptional product that your users will want to use.

Learning Objectives:

• Choosing Your Battles: spreading ourselves too thin, our individual efforts has less power.
• Conflict & Change Present Opportunity: make strongly informed, rational decisions and not decisions baseda on emotion.
• Timing is Critical: Consider the timing of everything you do.
• Creativity Creates Advantage: uniqueness, creativity, and innovation drive progress.
• No on Wins in Conflict: The lesson? Don’t seek conflict– seek resolution

You have been brought in to take over a team.  The team currently in place is not performing.  You have six weeks to deliver a program converting from one carrying broker to another along with all downstream bespoke systems. It is well known in the market that your current carrying broker is in financial distress.  The timeline has been dictated by the regulators.  If you don’t succeed the business can’t trade, no revenue will be earned, you will lose your client base.  The stakes are high!  No, this is not an academic case – it really happened.  What made the newly formed team succeed when the previous team did not?  Come to this session to find out and learn how you too, can turn failure into success.

Learn How To:

• Deliver a Program the Executive Team Doesn’t Believe is Possible but Must be Done
• Build and Manage a Cohesive Team Under Extreme Pressure
• Manage Stakeholders in a Fluid High Pressure Environment
• Dissolve the Team’s Fear and Inspire Them to Achieve the Impossible

The practice of architecture (enterprise, business, data, etc.) needs a services-based approach to providing business-outcome focused results. An architecture playbook captures the essential elements of architecture services providing the architecture practice team with a means of building, maturing, and even reinventing the architecture practice. Individual plays identify the type of service, the target stakeholders (i.e., customers), as well as recommend team composition, work approach, deliverables, tools, and more.  Individual architecture plays provide a descriptive foundation to grow the architecture practice team’s skills, toolsets, and adapt as organizational customer needs evolve. Participants will receive access to a sample playbook containing a range of plays addressing architectural services as well as orientation on the different parts and how tailor them for individual team use.

The Product Owner is a crucial person on any Agile team utilizing many different frameworks. The Product Owner is responsible for the “What” gets worked on and the priority. The Product Owner is the principal liaison to the business stakeholders and helps them to determine business value. They also team with the Scrum Master to insulate the team from unnecessary distractions. On any given day, the Product Owner may be working with the team on several different levels. Find out what background helps them to be a “Great” Product Owner.

Learning Objectives:

• Insight as to why their product owner does things the way they do
• Modify their interactions with the product owner to achieve better outcomes
• Managers gain information to modify requirements to make better hiring decisions for Product Owners

A long path to overnight success – 5 keys to accelerating value through business architecture.

As an Information Technology division, a gap existed in our ability to help our business partners view the value of IT investments thru the lens of enabling business objectives and driving towards strategic end states.  Our efforts to link technology to business outcomes began two years ago with a workshop and one informally titled business architect.  Not recognized as a strategic partner and without top-down support, our efforts stalled. However, with persistence and a new approach, we were able to remove barriers and position IT for success as a strategic partner.  We have now grown to a team of five, have invested in an EA tool, gained leadership support and our business partners asking, ‘When can you work with me?”  In our session we will share five key learnings to kick-starting your business architecture efforts and accelerate value.

Learning Objectives:

• Use What You Have to Tell the Story that Resonates with Leadership
• When to Get Help and Identifying the Help You Need
• Positioning a Team for Success – How to Help Your Team

The human body is an extraordinary collection of complex components and systems, but life is only possible when all of those components and systems work together in an orchestrated rhythm. Similarly, there are dozens of business components and systems (from value streams to business capabilities to agile release trains) that exist for the purpose of executing on strategy. But just like the human body, these components don’t breathe life into an organization unless they work together in an orchestrated rhythm. 

This presentation will address how strategic outcomes, value streams, business capabilities, KPIs, SAFe Agile practices, and feedback loops can all work together to create a living and breathing strategy-to-execution cycle for any organization.

Learning Objectives:

• Better understanding of practical applications of Business Architecture
• Exposure to innovative approaches to measuring Business Architecture effectiveness
• Broadened perspective of how Business Architecture can serve Strategy-to-Execution process

Do you ever wonder why some people absolutely love their work, get all the interesting projects, and are consistently being rewarded for their efforts, while others seem stuck, overwhelmed, and on the verge of burnout?

In this presentation, you’ll discover how to gain recognition and move to the next level – even without working overtime. We’ll pull back the curtain and take an insightful look at the limiting behaviors and patterns that may be unconsciously holding you back from more success. You’ll leave with simple adjustments that will empower you to say yes to the right opportunities and make wise investments with your time so that it will pay dividends for your organization and your life long career potential.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn how to identify career-advancing opportunities in your organization
• Reclaim 3 hours each week (or more!) to invest in the more fulfilling, rewarding work that actually advances your career
• Understand the limiting behaviors and patterns that might be unconsciously holding you back from more career success

A common piece of advice is that your team should discover the true need of your project. Unfortunately advice on how to make that happen isn’t as prevalent. In this session you’ll have a chance to practice a simple technique to get to the core of what your stakeholders need that has been around for over 2000 years – Socratic questioning.

Join Kent McDonald as he walks you through a technique aimed at uncovering the (not intentionally) hidden need that your stakeholders are trying to satisfy, without asking “why?” five times in a row. Kent describes the questions, why they work and in what context they work based on his experience with IT organizations and the Agile Alliance. You’ll then have a chance to practice them out to find out about a real project.

Come learn about and practice this technique so you can use it back at the office to drive toward the right outcome.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn what socratic questioning is
• Learn how to identify your stakeholders needs using socratic questioning
• Practice socratic questioning with your peers
• Determine when Socratic question is an appropriate technique to use||

In these days of digital transformation opportunities exists to reinvent businesses for the digital age, to fundamentally look at how work gets done and to deploy this ‘new work’ leveraging the best technology currently available.

The alternative is to put a digital veneer over your existing processes using dashboards and robotic process automation etc. If you do this, you may be able to say that you digitized your business but fundamentally the business is the same and, in many cases existing business processes fail in the digital age.

Either approach is a significant undertaking but only one will ensure long term success of your organization. As the old saying goes, ‘you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig!’

In this presentation you will hear the good, bad and the ugly of digital transformation, learn about the tools necessary for sustainable digital transformation and how the principles of Process Based Management, Design Thinking and Agile Project Management work together to take you on this rewarding journey.

Learning Objectives:

• How process Based Management and Design Thinking work together
• The use of AGILE project management to bring it to life
• How to turn your process pig into an agile cat

Many companies listen to the voice of the customer. It can increase marketing ROI, drive product strategy and improve customer loyalty. But most companies don’t realize the power of the customer to drive internal change.

Using two compelling case studies—one about a market leader struggling to stave off new competition, another about the challenges of bringing a disruptive technology to market—this presentation shows the power of the customer to inspire change. You’ll learn specific tools and techniques to use customer insights to overcome ingrained behaviors and become a rallying cry for organizational change.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize situations in which your organization is being resistant to change.
• Learn approaches for using customer insights to inspire change within your organization.
• Learn best practices for using insights to make your organization more agile and customer-focused.

What did the Ford GT40, allied planes in WW2, and the Cholera outbreak of 1854 have in common? They all solved a problem by focusing on the right metrics. As professional analysts, we are tasked with tracking numbers and showing how our businesses and organizations are succeeding at their goals. While spreadsheets can help us count records and reporting tools can aid in analyzing data sets, are we focusing on the right metrics? The goals of this presentation are to discuss what metrics are, why they are useful, and alternative methods to reviewing data. Specifically, this presentation will review innovative concepts from the business world, and best practices with state/local government.

Learning Objectives:

• What are good metrics versus bad metric?
• What is good data versus bad data?
• What are useful findings from data analysis?

This presentation is a case study on how a continuous process improvement team helped a successful high tech electronic manufacturer take the next steps in operational maturity. We have played a strategic role, working with the C-Suite, to define corporate strategic vision and success criteria, then break down the vision into policies, workflows and user process changes to achieve success criteria.

Key session topics:
– Identify, Categorization and mapping of organizational processes at multiple levels
– Scoping, Determining the ROI through depth, prioritization and tracking of the proposed process improvement initiatives
– Execution, Early Lean process improvement approaches by a small process team that needs to remain agile in a high paced start-up environment
– Sustain & empower, Process change management approach and sustainment through an organizational process playbook with reference material

Learning Objectives: 

• Used the overall business strategy to guide business architecture practices
• Achieved success in having the BA’s reduced waste by creating frameworks and process for product development and project management in additions to operational process
• To achieve user buy-in of new process and avoid change burn out

Many organizations have introduced process management practices with varying degrees of success and resistance. Continuing to progress in maturity and sustaining the effort is often challenging. This session will provide insights on how to initiate and advance your BPM practices and how to establish and enhance internal capabilities. It will provide recommendations to tackle a lack of well-accepted methodologies, training, tools, standards, metrics or benchmarks, to set you on the journey to progress along the maturity scale. Sasha will focus on how to develop broad buy-in and support and improve adoption of the effort. She will also look at a variety of structures from a single center to federated groups which require the coordination of best practices and support for enterprise wide process governance.

Sasha will share her experience gained from establishing and supporting Business Process Centers of Excellence across numerous organizations and industries.  Specifically, she will discuss key facts each BPM leader should know and myths they should watch out for. She will share her recommended approach to gain, maintain and grow the support required from the rest of the organization to thrive.

This session is aimed at both established BPM teams, and teams just starting out.

As our careers advance, sooner or later we encounter senior leaders and executives. We can be nervous and panic or we can focus on things that will help us become their trusted advisors and increase our effectiveness. It can take time to overcome nervousness and to build confidence in working with executives.

It need not take years of panicking to learn to positively interact with executives. This  session clearly lays out three key areas of focus to help you calmly and effectively work with and influence executives. They include interpersonal interactions, effective communication style, and understanding decision-making processes. The right kind of focus can change everything about your confidence and effectiveness.

Get started today by becoming more successful in your interactions with executives!

Learning Objectives:

• List the main myths and causes of failure working with executives
• Describe the 3 areas of focus to help work effectively with leaders
• Practice applying one of the key areas during the session

This interactive practitioner discussion will look at what data, at any level, has done for an organization and what obstacles need to be overcome and how.  Do you struggle getting your organization to realize the value of data?  Do you include data with your project work alongside of process?  This facilitated session will enable you to chat with practitioners to look at questions, such as:

• What did you do regarding data at your organization?
• What was the biggest “aha” for you or your organization?
• How did you move from “data” to “information”?
• How did this benefit your organization?
• What was the biggest obstacle you encountered and how did you overcome it?
• What one key suggestion would you share with others trying to bring an understanding of the value of data into their organization?

In this fully interactive and facilitated practitioner discussion session, you’ll have the opportunity to share your experiences and challenges of collaborating in a virtual world.  This session has no fixed agenda, so bring your ideas along and be prepared to discuss them with other practitioners! It’s envisaged that the topics covered will include:

o   Practical elicitation and collaboration techniques for a virtual environment

o   How to use virtual whiteboard and other note-taking tools

o   What are the advantages of a virtual environment?

o   How can we retain ‘the human touch’ when we’re working remotely?

Everyone who attends this session will have the opportunity to participate, ask questions and contribute their thoughts.

Wondering what’s next for your business analyst career? Want to share your career path or how your unique career opportunities moved your career forward? Considering switching domains or moving into new roles like consulting, leadership, management, training as a next step and want to hear what these options are actually like?

In this practitioner chat session, we’ll be discussing the various career options available to you as a business analyst. The facilitator will open with a short review of a model of a BA’s career path to frame our discussion, and then we’ll open it up to questions and contributions from attendees. Be ready to challenge your assumptions about what’s possible and see new opportunities to expand your career potential!

The pandemic has highlighted like never before the need to rapidly develop, evaluate and roll-out new policies and rules. When the status quo is upended, the rules must change. The pandemic just illustrates the point. In fact, policies and rules are changing all the time in the Knowledge Economy — and faster than ever. How have you been impacted? What glitches (and worse) have you experienced? What new tricks have you learned? How has it changed you practices and perspectives? Where does it look like things are headed in your organization?

We’ll kick off this session with a 5 minute introduction to position the issues, then we’ll open it up for attendees to share experiences and insights. Gather up your questions. We’ll all go in search of answers together!

When faced with aged, complex and siloed processes that need to be renewed and streamlined in order to pave the way for a new corporate vision and a technology platform implementation, how did Technical Safety BC approach the mammoth task across all its public facing processes?

In an organization that was bought together from a number of different agencies regulating different technologies such as Elevators, Gas, Boilers, Electrical Systems, Passenger Ropeways e.g chairlifts you can imagine the challenge that no two permits or enforcements followed the same processes. Couple this with aging IT systems that our processes had to twist to fit into, we had a lot of untangling and rethinking to do.

In this session we will openly share the approach we took starting with our strategy, building a process architecture, prioritizing our analysis and design efforts, redesigning our processes for the future and defining system capabilities to be acquired. We will share the successes and the challenges and how we pragmatically arrived at a sustainable set of patterns, practices and models to move us onto the implementation of our new platform and the renewal of our business.

Learning Objectives:

• The importance of language and terminology to gain understanding and buy in across diverse product types and functional areas
• The importance of project governance in creating and maintaining organizational change
• Gaining traction for organizational change by clarifying and sharing the value it will bring to your organization, clients and stakeholders

As the former Chief Process Officer of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Dan O’Neill will provide insight and learnings on the proven methods and techniques he used in the largest bank in Australia. Results included higher mortgage conversation rates, reduction in operational risk issues, an increase in market share, and a significant uplift in productivity. Using case studies Dan will share his insights on:

• Embedding end to end collaboration and shared objectives using process architecture
• Process Management and Improvement techniques, what you need to know
• Sustaining performance with governance over Process, Data, and Technology

Learning Objectives:

• The Do’s and Don’ts of establishing end to end process Management & Improvement
• Why sustaining process management and improvement is so difficult and how to overcome it.
• It’s People, Process and then Technology in that order for a reason. Find out why.

3… 2… 1… We have ignition. These familiar words evoke a sense of both awe and trepidation. This is the explosive moment. There is no turning back. You said you wanted commitment, well here it is! You might want to tighten those straps.

The theme of this year’s conference is igniting business agility. This panel will explore what such ignition might look and feel like in an organization. A big bang or a slow burn? What are the pre-conditions for ignition? Where’s the spark and what’s the fuel? What is needed to maintain the thrust? What boosters can be engaged?

The rocket has cleared the tower. Now what?

This presentation demonstrates how business analysts without help from IT can build, test, and deploy business decision models as cloud microservices. We will select a loan origination use case that is commonly used to demonstrate the capabilities of the DMN standard. Contrary to traditional implementations, we will show how to split a usually monolithic system into multiple decision microservices that could be tested separately and deployed as AWS Lambda functions. Then we will demonstrate how to use state machines to orchestrate these microservices to build various decision-making applications in the loan origination domain. This presentation intends to show that the representation of business knowledge remains the most important part of decision management. It will demystify the complexity of cloud-based development of operational decision services allowing subject matter experts to concentrate on their business issues while the modern cloud platforms take care of operational problems.

Learning Objectives:

• How to build and deploy operational decision services
• How to orchestrate decision microservices
• Demonstrating a complex cloud-based decision-making application

In 2017, the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) identified four strategic goals as part of their business plan. These goals included: 1) Less Crime and Victimization; 2) Engaged Communities; 3) Effective and Efficient Service; and 4) Healthy Organization. 

By launching the Court Notification System (CNS) Project through 2018-2019, the WPS anticipated achieving annual savings and successful outcomes in support of their goal for Effective and Efficient Service.  In the end, the project outcomes exceeded WPS’ expectations by far, and the positive impact of the CNS .

The Project Sponsor and WPS Executives were highly invested in the success of the project, and consistently aligned in prioritizing its importance. They communicated regularly with each other and WPS members, whether formally or informally, and this was key in ensuring WPS members remained up to date, motivated and engaged throughout the project. The result of this approach was absolute magic. With strong communication, open dialogue and buy-in.

Learning Objectives:

• Engaging Stakehloders
• Communicating with Stakeholder
• Defining the Objectives clearly and concisely

This is a case study on how the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) upgraded processes, IT tools, and people-skills simultaneously across all functional business systems and research groups to implement an enhanced export control program.  The presentation explains the approach used to plan, manage, and implement this huge effort involving 200+ improvement actions, 20 new or upgraded IT systems, and an organization-wide change management effort.  The team used business rules to structure the complex set of regulatory requirements, enterprise-architecture principles to understand change targets, extensive stakeholder interactions with 24 business systems to identify gaps, business process modeling to create and improve 100+ processes, and an innovative project-management approach to deliver an enhanced program in a little over two years.  This rapid implementation was imperative for PNNL to expand its use and creation of an ever-evolving set of sensitive technologies, which are essential to its research for the U.S. Department.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn how “boil-the-ocean” improvement efforts can actually succeed
• Understand how to implement export-control requirements that hit all business systems
• Learn how to seamlessly implement technology protections to improve competitiveness

“How do you move the adoption of business analysis forward in an organization when the majority of the organization doesn’t understand the value it brings? Organizationally, our Business Analysis Team sits outside of Business and IT (a fantastic advantage!). Yet — as many of you have experienced — several attempts to “tell” our value to the enterprise have fallen short. That is, until this year. Realizing that many people in Business and a few in IT were doing high level “business analysis”, we decided to try something new and create a BA Community to come alongside each other, provide training around standards, and build an inventory of knowledge with everyone’s artifacts.

Join us as we share the problems we faced and how we’re moving forward as a community to solve them. Our hope is to spark some ideas that you could put into place in your own organization.”

Learning Objectives:

• How to build a BA Community of Practice
• How to break down organizational silos
• How to build an inventory of knowledge

Design thinking PR paints it as a magic silver bullet panacea—perfect on-demand innovation projects every time.  The process pretty much involves practices that have long been recognized as producing better outcomes, but with some different terms.

“Empathy” is understanding customers’ or users’ thinking and needs from their own perspectives.  Isn’t that what competent business analysis always has achieved and troubled projects probably lacked?

“Ideation” is coming up with suitable, especially innovative solutions.  That too is a fundamental part of business analysis.  Yet, solutions have not always been suitable, let alone innovative.      

Yes, empathy and ideation are key but are far harder and scarcer than design thinking suggests and too often are merely hollow buzzwords in an all-too-conventional mistaken model.  This interactive session reveals common weaknesses that can undercut design thinking’s promise and presents powerful more appropriate models and methods that enable design thinking to achieve its potential.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify design thinking’s strengths and also its too-commonly-overlooked pitfalls
• Analyze what’s actually involved in effective empathy and ideation
• Describe a more appropriate model that better enables effective empathy and ideation

Many organizations have introduced process management and improvement practices with varying degrees of success and resistance. Continuing to advance in capability, and sustain the benefits can be challenging. This session will provide insights and practical guidance on how to grow your process practices and how to establish and enhance your internal capabilities and management acumen. It will provide recommendations for methodologies, skills transfer, tools, standards, metrics and benchmarks, to accelerate the journey towards better end-to-end business performance. Sasha will also discuss how to develop broad buy-in and support and improve adoption of the effort. Using illustrations from real companies, she will present a variety of frameworks suitable for a single central team and for federated groups.

Learning Objectives:

• Determine your maturity and readiness for process work
• Define the right process services for your organization’s situation
• Establish a manageable BPM roadmap

Let’s face it.  Change is disruptive.  And most disruptive change programs fail.  Why? Poor planning, employee resistance and lack of management support.  Good news! There are proven techniques to significantly increase your change success. Hear real stories from the trenches while learning how to apply proven change management techniques…and most importantly – learn from our mistakes! You’ll be prepared to show your organization how to attack change head on while avoiding failure. We’ll show you the most common mistakes when rolling out disruptive change and give you a roadmap for success. Only attend this session if you are prepared to become your company’s number one change agent!

Learning Objectives:

• Understand why change management is critical to project success
• Learn how to obtain executive buy in for change
• Understand the key components of an effective change management plan 
• Learn how to create a lean value pipeline to drive change
• Uncover details of effective operational readiness planning
• How to use OKR’s & KPI’s to ensure change benefits are sustained

At times, business analysts and project managers step on each other’s toes, especially when starting a new project. Though it may appear that their roles and tasks sometimes overlap, they are performed in different contexts. In this presentation, Tamara and Becky examine this from both viewpoints, look at the context in which each role is performed, and discuss ways to forge a clear path forward to collaborating with joy. Their presentation will kick off with story-telling, perspectives, and techniques. Then, Tamara and Becky will engage the audience with a Lean Coffee-style exercise to discuss different scenarios and questions pertinent to the attendees.

Learning Objectives:

• Acknowledge and identify points where the BA and PM roles intersect
• Learn ways to think about & better understand the lens through which PMs & BAs see their roles
• Share techniques to enhance communication and understanding between the two roles

The friction and misunderstanding that is commonly experienced by many development projects is the translation between the business domain vocabulary of the business analyst, and with that of the technical vocabulary of the development team. This misunderstanding introduces unnecessary complexities, inhibits communication and leads to incorrect implementations.  Domain Driven Design (DDD) can help adopt a ubiquitous language for developing requirements and design.  Context Mapping is a DDD technique that helped our business analyst and solutions architect explore a given business domain model within a given bounded context.  This allowed us to develop language that translated into a better design and quality user stories. 

This hands-on, interactive session will cover our case-study and give participants tools to conduct their own Context Mapping meetings and create Context Diagrams.

Learning Objectives:

• What is Domain Driven Design and how can it help with requirements?
• How does the Business Analyst and Architecture Partnership work in Domain Driven Design?
• Where in the requirements process do you get the boost?
• What is Context Mapping and how to do it?
• When and how to discuss Business Process when Context Mapping

Coffee Roundtables – grab your coffee and share experiences with your peers to explore the new challenges of operating in a largely virtual world. 

What comes in mind when you listen the term “Agile Requirement”?

Usually, it is not referring exactly to a concrete requirement, but rather to some requirements engineering related process. The title Agile Requirement usually refers to techniques as User Stories, Story Mapping, Acceptance Criteria, BDD, Prototyping, Backlog Management, Kanban… focused on software development projects using an agile approach.

The usual definition: “The development team must be able to change a requirement during the solution development project to maximize the value delivered by the project”.
The new definition proposed bellow is more comprehensive, applicable to both agile and cascade approaches and oriented to business agility. And it is not about processes, but it is a real concrete requirement that must be added to all digital transformation initiatives.

The agile requirement new definition: “The business manager must be able to dynamically reconfigure business behavior to maximize customer value without the need for a new development project.

Learning Objectives:

• Ignite business agility with dynamically configurable solutions
• Use the agile requirement to stimulate your team’s creativity
• Model business as configurable processes and rules

Cyber security continues to be a huge problem in today’s world and will continue to escalate in the coming years. Security awareness education and training has proven to an effective defense for many social engineering tactics. However, the implementation and employee engagement of security awareness programs tends to be very challenging for many organizations which severely limits the effectiveness of the programs. This presentation describes how one medical device manufacturer implemented a security awareness program using gamification featuring the characters from Disney’s hit series the Mandalorian.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the need for security awareness training and programs
• Be able to understand gamification and how to utilize it in cyber security awareness training programs
• Learn techniques and tools used in cyber security awareness gamification

Are you a remote business analyst or do you manage remote business analysts? Are you worried that a remote BA can’t be as effective as one in an office?  Whether you were remote before the pandemic or suddenly became remote after, you know that working from home is not the same as working from an office. And you may have experienced challenges with virtual communication and collaboration that left you feeling like you’ve been left out. You can learn practices that will keep you connected with your team so you can do your best work remotely.

In this talk, you’ll discover what “virtual presence” is and ways to improve it to help avoid errors in remote communication. You’ll learn about synchronous and asynchronous communication methods, when to use them and why online meetings should be used sparingly. You’ll experience techniques and learn some best practices that will improve your virtual facilitation and collaboration. And, let’s have a little fun and talk about adding some team spirit to your communication too!

Equipped with this information, you’ll analyze your remote work situation and create a plan for what practices you will stop, start, and keep doing to be an effective remote analyst.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the key areas that present challenges for the remote analyst vs an analyst in the office
• Learn strategies and techniques that address challenges remote analysts face in online facilitation, communication and collaboration
• Analyze your remote work situation to identify the ways you’ll address your specific remote challenges
• Create your action plan to address what you’ll stop, start and keep doing and get ready to share that plan with your manager or team

“Data Modeling, done well, is an effective and precise way to understand and document what a business needs (data and rules) and it is a highly effective way to enable a business rethink its core business. It is one aspect of modeling a business. Data Modeling is of the business, for the business, and by the business.”

This interactive session provides the Business Analyst and Manager with the tools and information to be able to understand and explain Business Data Models to business clients as
well as be able to build a Business Data Model. Topics include:
• What is Business Data Modeling – Why do we do it?
• When do you build a Business Data Model?
• How do you build a Business Data Model?

Learn How To:

• Build a Business Data Model with business clients who have never seen a data model
• Use the modeling session to clarify the business
• Active Listening affects the model and how to effectively listen to your clients
• Harness the collective knowledge of your clients to build a model that they embrace
• Make the model truly their model

Many organizations have experienced some type of disruption. These disruptions can range from hurricanes to pandemics to human error. Is your organization prepared to sustain its essential business processes if all or part of it is impacted by a disruption?  By building an organization’s business continuity capacity the risk of disruption is reduced, and the impact of a disruption and time to stabilize operations following the disruption is decreased.

What are the essential components of a business continuity plan?  How do you tackle each component and what order should things be done?  Learn from an author of a how to guide, the essentials and sequence of events for developing a business continuity plan.  A case study will illustrate what we helped a major client organization finalize just 2 months before Covid-19 struck.

Learning Objectives:

• How a business continuity plan is different from an emergency preparedness plan
• How to identify and prioritize the business processes associated with the organization
• How risk mitigation is different from continuity options and why both are included in a business continuity plan

How do you protect your company’s data? How do you know where to spend limited resources? This case study walks through the processes one team of BAs used to get from vague ideas to guiding policies to real cyber security, including how we demonstrated the value of security to stakeholders all the way up to a Fortune 100 company board. 

Learning Objectives:

• Getting started with cybersecurity policies
• Using an agile mindset to drive results
• Tracing policy to features
• Playing the role of product owner when you’re not the expert
• Communicating value to sponsors

How does an organization identify and implement a successful ethical initiative across a forty-year profession? Learn how a Customer Journey Map exercise was utilized to identify core aspects of an ethical professional and then leveraged across multiple stakeholder groups to build out an improvement plan. Discover how an analyst can help various stakeholders change their individual perspectives to better support outcomes that benefit the audience.

This real-world case study will delve into the challenges, successes, and failures an organization faced when addressing the ethical development lifecycle of licensed professionals. By using a Customer Journey Map to address professional development needs from education through career growth and eventual career sunset, this project was able to expose gaps in the development process and identify new product considerations. Learn how to iterate from a Customer Journey Map to create buy-in and understand how rapid prioritization allowed product rollouts in short bursts of effort.

Learning Objectives:

• Define key moments within a customer journey and how to map the critical aspects of each phase
• Iterate from a completed Customer Journey Map to expose big ideas for possible product development
• Leverage multiple stakeholders to create buy-in and identify product and service prioritization.

Business rules are about more than documenting organizations’ internal operations. Today’s digital technology, including chatbots and wizards, also creates new possibilities for automated yet personalized customer service — driven by natural language business rules that apply logic to customer queries. This session will use commercial and government vignettes to advocate for a new approach to rules-driven customer self-service — delivered automatically and when customers need help the most. It will show how business rules are key to boosting organisations’ customer satisfaction and market competitiveness, and to governments’ delivery of rapid assistance to people who need it most, while also maximizing regulatory compliance.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn how business rules can be deployed for multiple end-user personas
• Discover how business rules can drive customer service and improved customer satisfaction
• Explore different types of rules-driven application, including chatbots and online self-service

Securing the business is not just the role of our Security teams.  It is everyone’s role.  And analysts are in a unique position to ensure that our businesses are as secure as possible.

Our Security professionals are the supreme experts on the threats and vulnerabilities we must guard against and the steps we can take to guard against them.  In collaboration with them, we Analysts can ensure that the full range of business objectives and needs are assessed to be sure that the full range of security risks have been identified and mitigated and that those mitigations enhance (rather than impede) our chances of business success.

Learning Objectives:

• Engage effectively with security professionals
• Ensure security priorities and actions are best suited the business needs
• Lay the foundation for making security the normal state for the business

Community is the foundation of Open Source organizations. Communities of Practice are just one type of community in those organizations. Communities of Practice (CoPs) are groups of people who engage in a process of collective learning: a team of developers seeking new solutions, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a network of business analysts exploring new techniques, a gathering of first-time project managers helping each other learn and grow. CoPs provide a unique opportunity for feedback to come directly from the field to the engineer and back again. This circle of feedback fosters teamwork, innovation, and transparency in an organization. However, Communities of Practice can only succeed if they have a strong foundation, collaboration, and a desire to share. Red Hat has over thirty-five successful global CoPs. Learn how they were created, how they continue to grow and how your organization can create their own Communities of Practice.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe Community of Practice and their benefits
• Examine Communities of Practice at Red Hat
• Formulate a plan to create your own Community of Practice

There has been a lot of talk about Process Architecture, but how is it really different to process design or process re-engineering, and what are its benefits? And how could an organization approach establishing a Process Architecture?This session will explain why an organization would want to use the Process Architecture framework to enable more effective process analysis & improvement work. A recent case study will be used to demonstrate some basic steps and templates you can use to establish a Process Architecture. They will also use a recent case study to demonstrate some basic steps and templates you can use to establish a Process Architecture.

Learning Objectives:

• Challenges with typical process re-design efforts and how Process Architecture answers them
• Establishing a draft high level Process Architecture|Importance of a ‘North Star’
• The Process IGOE Model

Join us for a fireside chat about the innovations that are transforming not just financial services but the global economy. What are the implications of these transformations on business activities and how are we preparing to meet these changes? This chat welcomes guest Gabriel Leiva von Bovet, Executive VP at Zafin, a worldwide leader in digital banking, in conversation with Jared Gorai of IIBA on how Fintech is impacting the world in general and your role in particular.

Not so long ago, banks were offering products and services for which they claimed no substitutes existed. Now we have cash-less payments such as Apple Pay and Bitcoin that completely redefine the landscape and a mobile payments company with a market cap almost as high as Citigroup. Once viewed as fierce competition, traditional banking is now working with FinTech companies to offer new products and services to customers, saving time and money, and delivering overall better customer experience.