2020 Tutorials Announced!

Stay tuned for the full agenda

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

What Attendees Will Learn:

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

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

Work Together to Launch a Rocket to Mars!

This innovative board game challenges players to build and launch a rocket to Mars. Players form Agile teams, collaborating through “Sprints” to complete important tasks. The game tracks each team’s score, along with other metrics used in Agile, such as “Velocity”. Teams will compete against one another to make it to Mars. In order to win the game and successfully launch your rocket, your team will have to demonstrate characteristics of actual successful Agile teams.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Prioritize requests to ensure vital tasks are completed on time
• Plan a Sprint based on customer interests and team member skills
• Adapt to unplanned events in an Agile environment

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.

Sure, you know how to use Visio. But can you really make it sing and dance? In this workshop, you will take your Visio knowledge to the next level in order to build diagrams more effectively and create more powerful drawings.

You’ll learn tips and techniques for making Visio do what you want it to (rather than living with what Visio wants to do!). You’ll learn how to create custom shapes and then build custom stencils and templates that you and your colleagues can use in order to create consistent looking diagrams across the organization. You’ll discover little-used features that allow you to get work done more quickly, including adding “hidden” features to the Visio ribbon so your new favorite features are always a click away. You’ll learn about the ShapeSheet, a behind-the-scenes component of Visio that gives you the power to make Visio do exactly what you want it to. You will also learn about Visio macros that can be used to automate repetitive functions.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Create more effective business diagrams with less effort
• Build corporate colors, style, and design into Visio diagrams
• Convey more information more effectively via your diagrams     
• Harness the real power of Visio