BBC 2021 Agenda Announced

Organizations are increasingly embarking on ‘digital transformation’ programs. Yet the words ‘digital’ and ‘transformation’ often mean very different things to different people and there’s a real danger that changes will be implemented that don’t meet expectations (or perhaps make things worse!). 

Business analysis is a crucial enabler to creating clarity over what is needed, and why change is being pursued in the first place.  It’s easy to imagine that we need a whole new set of BA tools.. But the good news is that our existing toolkit works well in a digital context too! All we need is a shift in analysis focus. 

In this practical, hands-on and interactive session you will hear about a range of analysis tools that are relevant in a digital context.  The session covers:

• Techniques for understanding stakeholder perspectives, engagement and understanding what outcomes stakeholders want. 
• A practical approach to Journey Mapping
• What ‘business events’ are and why they matter
• Approaches to challenging existing constraints and innovating

You will take away a practical, applicable toolkit that you can use on your own projects.

All projects have their promoters and their detractors, people that can either make or break your project or your team.  This presentation will give you practical advice on who you need to focus on, show you how to classify where each person sits on the “Interest, Attitude, and Power” axis of your Stakeholder chart and how to improve the attitude and interest of the power players in your world.  

This presentation will cover the basics and then quickly move into advanced topics, using exercises and situational case studies to emphasize key points, to help you achieve the best win-win outcome for you, your team and your project.

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

Very few people fully comprehend written requirements documentation. Agile representations of requirements documentation is in pictures!  In this session we’ll cover different forms of process modeling, from beginner to intermediate, including brainstorming processes, basic process modeling, pivotal process flows, and sequence diagrams. Pivotal Process Flows are an innovative approach to process modeling.  

There is a TED Talk that says if you can model Making Toast, you can model ANY process. Communicating with pictures is a fundamental BA Skill. A picture is worth a thousand words!

IIBA®’s BABOK® provides 50 techniques and the Agile Extensions provide another 24 techniques as tools for business analysts to have at their hands to walk the gauntlet of challenges they will face as they lead the charge to provide business value to an organization. Reading how to do something is one thing but learning how to do it, applying it and then building upon your own skill set is a completely other side of the equation of these useful techniques.  Let alone, how do you have fun and not only engage your stakeholders, customers and clients, but get them also collaborating together and enjoying the change work for successful outcomes?

This tutorial session will focus on student participation and hands-on practice of using techniques directly from the the BABOK® Guide and Agile Extensions in new and innovative ways. Thoughts for what to do when your best practices fail to deliver and you need to adjust to delight your customer will be emphasized as core takeaways of the session. And how to have some fun by being innovative!

Learning Objectives:

• Identify new ways to apply techniques for greater outcomes with stakeholders
• Think differently about your own approach to utilizing techniques on business analysis and project management work
• Identify key applications of technique approaches that can be immediately applied to current real-world challenges

When you use a Google map, you want to see where your destination is in relation to where you are. But you also want to know what you’ll find along the way; what the traffic conditions are like; which way to go in case of an accident. In contrast, when you look at most process maps, all you get is a picture. Sure, it’s helpful to see the path from start to finish, but you also need to identify the key players; what risks you’ll encounter; which alternate paths you might need; and where to get additional information. If your organization’s process maps are little more than pictures, come to this workshop to get hands-on experience creating content-rich maps. The exercises for this workshop were created for Microsoft Visio but many of the ideas could be used with other mapping software. Note: this is a hands-on workshop. You will need a laptop with Microsoft Visio installed, preferably Visio Professional or Visio Plan 2, although you’ll be able to complete most exercises with Visio Standard.

A great Product Owner can help organizations achieve amazing outcomes for their customers.  As more organizations transform to an Agile way of working, many Business Analysts have the opportunity to step up to a Product Owner role.  A Product Owner needs many of the same skills as Business Analysts, but it also requires additional knowledge, skills, and a mindset shift.  Will you be ready for this next step in your career?

Successful Product Ownership is more than backlogs and user stories.  It involves a deep understanding of how to find the right problem/solution fit and the right product/market fit.

In this tutorial, you’ll experience product development from concept to cash and understand how to discover the right customer problems to solve to maximize the value delivered by your team.  You’ll learn the tools of the product management trade and be able to apply those new techniques in your organization.

Join us for this session and take your career to the next level.

In an age of increasing complexity where time is precious, building meaningful connections with stakeholders is becoming more challenging. Business Analysts must find new innovative ways to engage their audience. In recent years the concepts of ‘Visual Thinking’ and ‘Sketchnoting’ have grown in popularity with many companies now starting to recognise the power of visualisation as a means of exploring complex problems, making information easier to retain and recall, generating ideas, creating engagement and so much more…

This hands-on workshop aims to provide BA’s with a practical introduction to Visual Thinking and Sketchnoting. It will explain what visual thinking is and why it is such a powerful tool for BA’s to capture the attention of their teams and stakeholders. Delegates will get a firm grounding in the building blocks of visual thinking with practical exercises that will help to build confidence and overcome ICD (“I can’t draw”) syndrome!

‘Pursuing Purpose through Process’ which is looking at the Ethical, Social, and Governance considerations, Purpose Driven Companies, Corporate Responsibility trends and how organizations can bring this to life using sound business architecture and process management to achieve it.

You’re a Business Analyst. You know how to elicit requirements and analyse them. You are objective about your stakeholders’ needs, understand the project scope, can determine the cost benefit and yet you still hit challenges like these:

·       Why aren’t people coming up with new ideas in your workshops?

·       Your problem problem-solving sessions don’t reach the right solution!

·       Estimating is seen as a black art…….

What if you knew what influences people to take one course over another? 

There is so much more to a decision feeling right for somebody than just the facts in front of them.  Join me in this workshop and we will explore these problems and others, draw on the fields of psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics and apply them to Business Analysis. We’ll investigate ways to overcome cognitive biases and help counter the natural tendencies of our brains.

You will take away from this session

· What a Cognitive Bias is

· How they affect both you, and your stakeholders

· How to spot common Cognitive Biases in others and help them see them too.

· How to spot them in yourself

· Approaches for overcoming them, or using them to your advantage

Business analysis is historically used to define needs and recommend solutions on projects, but it is also used on an organizational level to define strategy. Analysis shapes and defines how capabilities are applied to reach the goals and objectives of the enterprise. In this session, come learn how to use some of the techniques found in the BABOK Guide to define and articulate corporate strategy. 

In this deep dive into corporate strategy building, current chair Barbara Carkenord and former chair (current IIBA Chief Engagement & Growth Officer) Keith Ellis will look at the different stages of IIBA strategy development and how business analysis capabilities enable strategic change. 

Learning Objectives: 

Look at an end-to-end framework of strategy development. 

How is strategic change communicated between executive and the board? 

Business analysis techniques in action – where and how were these applied? 

How do you go from an initial idea or brief, through step-by-step preparation, to an engaging, well-run, effective session resulting in agreed actions and clear follow up?  Join Penny Pullan as she shows you how to feel competent and confident as you deliver great results, with everyone committed to their actions afterwards, whether meeting virtually or face-to-face. With a timely focus on the challenge of hybrid environments.

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

Throughout history, people we now count as great innovators and creative minds faced challenges and roadblocks. When we encounter impediments, should we abandon our ideas, should we back off, should we play it safe? Nah! Let’s challenge the norm, identify a new outlandish goal, and abandon old paradigms. When the path to successful innovation is clear, are you ready for the Innovator’s journey? In this workshop, we’ll explore the vast, complicated universe of creativity and innovation. We’ll discover a framework for innovation and creativity that will help us fan the spark within our organizations and projects, to find those curious risk takers and ground breakers. We’ll learn to identify where we are within the framework and how to leap to the next level.

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

A golden rule: “Understand the real need before proposing a solution”. Although everyone recognizes this rule, a lot of enterprises still start with a specific defined solution for an unknow need. There is a misunderstanding of the value of the BA, seen as a contract generator who must define all the OUTPUTS to be delivered by a development team. At the end, dissatisfied customers complain: “This solution does not solve my need”. The development team is unhappy: “Need? What need? We did exactly what was asked.” Result: dissatisfied customers and developers. This situation must change. An executive view of any enterprise must make the current situation clear and describe the OUTCOMES expected. Detailed scope, budgets and plans are only made later, incrementally and with the collaboration and creativity of the development team who must take responsibility for reaching OUTCOMEs instead of OUTPUTs. 

Learning objectives – What you will learn:

• How to represent requirements in the form of OUTCOMEs instead of OUTPUTs 
• Techniques to understand and represent the current situation and the desired situation in a collaborative way 
• How to sell a change to the executive team Presentation Level Foundational

As Business Analysts, we’re comfortable with mapping our existing processes. These are often a reflection of business needs, and the most efficient and effective way to accomplish a certain task or transaction. 

Now, I have a dirty little secret about that, that we all know, but will only admit to in secret back room meetings and behind closed doors. The secret? That we often forsake the needs of our customers to advance the needs of the business. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Finding the “gold” along the customer journey is not hard, if you know how and where to look. And in doing so, our organizations can become customer experience juggernauts, that maximizes value, and if done right, minimizes effort and burden; for you and your customers.

In the “Treasure Hunting Along the Customer Journey” workshop, participants will learn practical, how-to approaches to developing empathy, mapping the customer journey, and finding business process improvement opportunities on the parallel path.

Attendees Will Learn

• What a Customer Journey Map is, and how to build one
• How to identify the needs, wants, and desires of your customers, and how that should impact the projects we work on.
• How to layer your customer’s journey onto your existing business processes, to figure out how to REALLY make your customers happy!

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 of cybersecurity talent, organizations need everyone to take responsibility for cybersecurity – to think and act securely. And to ensure that cybersecurity solutions are value-driven, performing accurate risk assessments are foundational. 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 the mammoth Cyber-world issues through tutorials, group discussions, and risk assessment exercises on real-life security incidents. You will learn to implement key security components and take away approaches to implement today and onward in the ever-expanding new cyber-landscape.

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Deep Learning:  From the Garry Kasparov chess defeat to the recent Libratus Texas Hold’em victory, machines are getting smarter and smarter.  This talk will provide overview of artificial intelligence the terminology and basics.  We will review where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Learning Objectives:

• A basic understanding of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning
• Some of the Major players and ideas in the industry
• Making AI a part of the corporate plan

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.

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

Imagine an organization where product ownership isn’t happening as you know it can! Join us to learn how you can use analysis skills to strongly influence product ownership success. Feel empowered to lean into this influential role! You can lead the product ownership, you may or may not have decision making authority, but you can guide, influence, and serve up the decisions. This isn’t some pipe dream or nightmare, it’s a reality many successful agile BAs find themselves in. It is a great career opportunity to build leadership, influence, coaching, and strategy skills, ultimately getting noticed!  We would like to share how we have seen this work and give you our lessons learned, key strategies, and practical nuggets you can implement right away!

In this session you will learn:

• Learn how business analysis skills influence & integrate with product ownership
• How to position yourself as a facilitator of decision making no matter what your title
• Key strategies and practical insights you can use get started

Four years ago, Republic Bank of Chicago started its journey towards organizational agility—making change a routine part of organizational life. Learn how the bank’s innovation, business process, product approval, and project management practices created the foundation that allows the business to respond quickly to changing priorities.

The five essential components of business analysis can be summed up in these steps: Stakeholder Analysis, Current State Analysis, Future State Analysis, Gap Analysis, and Requirements Management. Master these, and the rest is gravy. The session will focus on these five areas and corresponding tools that can be implemented at your desk tomorrow. Surprisingly, some of these areas are often overlooked leaving holes in a project. Essential Business Analysis is the core of any successful program. Give your product a High Five!

In this session, we’ll look at the role of the BA on an Agile project and the ways it might play out under different circumstances.How would it work, for example, if no Product Owner is assigned to the team? What if there is a Product Owner? What if they don’t have time to devote to the project? What if there are several Product Owners? Or a committee?

The BA can be important in any of these scenarios. But what they must do and how they must operate changes. So yes, we’ll have to look at each of them.

Session Outline

The Product Owner Role

The BA’s role when:

• There is no Product Owner
• There is an active Product Owner
• There is an absentee Product Owner
• There are several Product Owners
• The Product Owner is a committee

As enterprises look for more automation opportunities, the focus is shifting from core business processes and decisions to the development of digital workers. This requires the Business Analyst to leverage a large palette of models and capabilities to support a detect – process – act – optimize pattern, for a wide array of use cases. These capabilities include complex event processing, AI, machine learning, robotic agents and process/task mining. This session reviews these building blocks and others, the type of models they involve, and how they are assembled to build digital worker skills on real-life examples. It also offers guidelines for what activities are suitable for digital workers versus what stays with humans.

Do BUZZWORDS fly over your head during meetings with your business team? Are you in the dark on what your next steps might be for your latest elicitation session? Join Jenny and Tara as they present practical everyday scenarios and the tools and techniques in their toolbelt to wrangle those pesky problems. Learn how to Prototype (BABOK 10.36) using a pencil, paper, post-it notes and a paperclip. Watch and learn as these common BAs show you how to organize your business discussions into a Concept Model (BABOK 10.11) and Glossary (BABOK 10.23) and many more.

Product development starts with understanding a customers needs and pain points. This journey has evolved from understanding requirements to becoming customer centric and data driven and futuristic to humanizing these digital experiences.

Does Agile mean the end for Business Analysts? No – but many organizations are calling upon BAs to step into Product Owner and Product Manager roles. Being successful in this new role means leveraging existing business analysis skills, applying new techniques, and shifting your approach.

Will you be ready for this next step in your career?

Come to this interactive session to explore the role of the Product Manager and understand how this can be the next evolution of the Business Analyst. You’ll understand the mindset shift needed to be successful as a Product Manager, learn how you’ll need to adapt and get hands-on experience with new tools and techniques.

Businesses are making changes at a pace that was thought unimaginable even five years ago. Many factors play a part in the changes, such as customer demands, technology advances, and rivalries. Business change is more complicated and demanding than in the past. The number one priority in any change project is the people factor.

Customers have higher expectations than in the past. The other people who prioritize are the employees, vendors, stakeholders, consultants, and any other person that will be affected by the change. Preparing all people is a crucial first step to get them to be a partner in the changes.

Transparency is key throughout the project. Employees of affected areas will feel threatened just by hearing the word change or transformation in a project. The earlier that “how does this affect me?” can be answered, the smoother the adjustments will be for everyone.

As the world focuses more on outcomes, the focus also shifts away from projects and towards products. The success of a product depends on the customers’ perception of how well they address their needs. Many organizations have gone to an agile product development practice to ensure that the perceptions of their customers are met, and the Product Owner becomes the driving force for the product’s development. 

In this session, learn about the importance of the Product Owner and how your business analysis skills can provide value to your organization in understanding and meeting your customer’s needs. 

Learning Objectives: 

• The need for product ownership analysis skills 
• Understand roles and responsibilities in product management 
• How business analysis tools and techniques are used in Product Ownership 

We all know agile was initially designed with software development teams in mind. However, business agility is only possible if an organization has a quality-oriented culture that collectively shapes what we do as an organization and how we do it. To accomplish this, agile team practices have had to spread to all areas of an organization, so that now agile teams now exist in a wide variety of departments beyond IT, all with different functions and skills. Agile teams can now be found in HR, Marketing, Finance, and even Legal departments!

Ensuring that teams across an organization work with common practices inspired by the Agile values and with a Lean mindset is not easy. Teams are not always clear about what it means to be agile and which practices best fit their needs and enable them respond to change efficiently and sustainability.

Join Miquel to get 7 essential Lean Agile practices for any agile team who wants to respond in a sustainable way to the changing needs of its customers.

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

60-90% drop in aviation traffic. The industry faces the most difficult moment in its modern history. Our Chief Product Owner wants to define the development direction for our product portfolio. Several hundred employees are affected. A strategic business analyst comes into play to help.

All the most important figures in the company should cooperate – senior product owners, sales, controlling, IT. They didn’t take such an active part in defining strategy before.

Check our case study from the perspective of a strategic business analyst. Learn the techniques used in the business strategy analysis, planning, and testing. Check how we have developed scenarios, business cases, hypotheses. Learn how we involved stakeholders to co-create the strategy.

Hanna will share how they worked on a strategy for the IT and aviation industry strongly affected by the pandemic and developed directions for the product portfolio. You’ll see how the strategic business analyst helps with their skills.

Over the past decade it appears our BA profession and industry has been very focused on operations and efficiency – the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. The BA role, awareness and profile have all been raised, yet the statistics show program/project failure rates remain unacceptably high on a global basis. Statistics show that 40% of program/project failure can be traced to ineffective business analysis. 

Meanwhile, changing market forces combined with technology innovation and usage, is forcing business leaders to think more strategically to look at ways of transforming the business. Business leaders in turn are seeking the strategic business analyst to assist them with this. The BA profession needs to make its changes as well and participate more fully in the ‘why’. 

This discussion explores and presents some new ways of thinking to understand the complexities of transformation and business change programs. The disciplines of business analysis and the role of the (strategic) business analyst are more important than ever. Strategic business analysis follows strategic planning to establish and drive the business change programs.  

Learning Objectives: 

• New ways of thinking to understand the complexities of transformation. 
• The importance of the role of strategic business analysis in effecting change 
• The necessary changes in business analysis to better participate in the why of effective change. 

You may be interested in developing your leadership skills as a BA, but have you ever stooped to think about the quality of your followership skills? 

We live in a world where the quality of leadership is considered to be absolutely critical to the success of projects and organisations. But followership skills are not mentioned, and the concept of being a follower has negative connotations. Many BAs do not want traditional leadership positions, but we do want to be heard, for our work have impact and to have appropriate influence on decisions. This role is often referred to as being a ‘trusted advisor’. 

This session will explore current leadership theories, how to develop as a follower and what it really means to be a trusted advisor.

In the late 1890s, Pareto showed that 80% of the wealth in Italy was controlled by 20% of the population. 130 years later the ‘Pareto principle’ is still used to determine what is ‘mainstream’ and what is an ‘exception’. But should it be?

All too often, applying the principle simplistically leads to services and processes being designed that marginalize vulnerable stakeholder groups. However, it doesn’t have to be this way and there are a range of tools that can be used by BAs to help ensure this trap is avoided. In this presentation you will hear:

• The importance of understanding ‘variety’, and how this relates to service design
• Practical approaches for understanding stakeholders and their perspectives
• How journey maps and personas work well, but alone they aren’t enough
• How ‘persona overlays’ can be helpful in ensuring design is inclusive

This presentation focuses on practical tools, and blends ideas from service design, systems thinking and business analysis

Is your data organization not living up to expectations? Its structure might not be aligned with your company’s data needs and goals.

This presentation covers:

Understanding the Data Organization Spectrum

• Overview of the data organization spectrum, including three key org. types: Centralized, Federated, Democratized. Includes a description of each type’s associated benefits, challenges, and mitigations.

Understanding Which Data Organization is Best for Your Company

• Reviews organizational design principles and how to use them to decide what data organization works for your company. Illustrates these principles by showing how an actual company used them to choose its data organization type.

Transitioning Data Organization Types

• Provides a playbook to change your data organization as your company’s goals change. Reviews the goals, best practices, and mechanics of organizational design. Walks through critical steps to execute an organizational design change.

Successful product development hinges upon the ability to win the hearts and minds of those who are involved in fulfilling the product vision. But what practical steps can be taken to actually achieve this?Join Grant Wright and Pardeep (aka Paddy) Dhanda, for an immersive hands on session, where they will explore the power of Visual Thinking. They will introduce the 5 visual thinking types that every Product Owner should know about through their unique storytelling approach. Be prepared to draw along and help create the ultimate product vision!

Industries are undergoing drastic changes in the coming decades like never before. With all these changes happening, what is the link between strategies and what gets implemented to realize those strategies, ensuring that operations are a reflection of the vision? Business Capabilities are the one constant link.From executive desks to company operations, organizations adopting Business Capabilities as reference can increase significantly that strategies be reflected in implementations, linking the whole organization, bridging architecture to analysis to development and finally implementation. Whether they are used to define strategies, organize and analyze business processes, prepare projects, perform requirements modeling or for ROI activities, business capabilities provide a clear scope definition of the targeted business vision, highlighting the context and therefore facilitating decisions. They ensure greater velocity and in validating that all business areas are addressed.

In our CHANGING WORLD, it is important to pay more and more attention to PEOPLE and to RELATIONS by creating a climate of TRUST, in which MOTIVATION is cultivated; like a small tree that over time grows and becomes more and more robust! To support this path in a genuine way, characterized by EMPATHY, RESPECT, TRANSPARENCY and ACTIVE LISTENING, let’s discover together some SECRETS to keep in mind when we facilitate a meeting or a workshop!

During meetings and workshops we are closer to others and for this reason they are precious moments, a gift not to be underestimated: we could create CONNECTIONS and a FERTILE GROUND in which CARE and PRESENCE are the fundamental aspects! We can also be creative, explore new horizons and overcome our limits.

In this session we will explore together BA and Creative Thinking techniques and principles to facilitate, lead and inspire others.

Okay I get it – data is ALL the rage right now! But I’m not a data scientist! I just want to be able to use my data to GET THINGS DONE! Where do I start?

Data can help us answer so many questions, but only if we know how to successfully leverage the power of data. You do not need to be a technical expert with years of data analysis or be called a data scientist! You simply need to know some basics on how both your business and the data is setup. Then with a few good questions, you can pull together some powerful insights that help teams make informed decisions!

In this session Jamie will walk you through how to approach using data to help you make informed decision making. We’ll discuss how you can figure out what data you need to present viable recommendations to leadership. We’ll also list out the steps for working with the “data people” to get information that helps your decision making processes.

In the business of process management, we need to focus.

How many business processes are there in your organization? A few? A handful? Dozens? Depending how deep you go into the process hierarchy, there are at least hundreds and more like thousands. Go just a bit deeper and there are tens of thousands.

So, you have thousands of important processes to be managed and continuously improved? Tens of thousands of them! How could that work? It’s just not possible.

The good news is that neither is it necessary.

Knowing a little bit about lots of processes is quite useless. Much better to know a great deal about fewer processes. Build deep knowledge of process content and context allowing better decisions about managing process, and therefore organizational, performance.

This presentation explains the Process Priority Pyramid and how to select the optimum set of processes for active management and the knowledge required to achieve that.

Last year we shared our journey to establish a great business architecture foundation. This year we have progressed to utilizing Business Architecture to facilitate strategic discussions with our business partners. In this session we share our approach to conducting Quarterly Business Review meetings, where we are partnering with our business units to connect business to available technology and identify future technology needs through demand shaping. Business Architecture is the key component in that facilitation to strengthen relationships. It’s our bridge – our connector!

What did the Ford GT40, 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 task 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 state government.

Enable change more effectively with a proven process and a set of tools. Learn how a simple change model, a growth mindset, and a people-positive attitude have helped thousands of stakeholders at dozens of companies work through hundreds of changes and transitions. Then learn to apply that handful of simple techniques that will help you adopt, master, and leverage the model, the mindset, and the attitude in the work you do. You’ll be able to help your stakeholders through any transition more effectively, regardless of the change itself, and regardless of the stakeholders or their change appetite. Easy to learn, simple to talk about, and proven to be effective over and over. This approach will save you time and energy and will help you enable change faster and more completely than you’re doing today, saving your organization countless hours, helping stakeholders have better workdays, and bringing new ideas to market even faster than you do today.

Virtual teams are commonplace now and will likely continue post pandemic.  As companies open flexibility in their workplaces, talent will be diversely located. As teams spread across cultures, regions, and time zones; they primarily use technology to talk to one another. Email and text communication as the primary method can be easily misunderstood.

10,000+ people in a remote manager/employee relationship were surveyed about the quality of the most influential leader in their life. The one common word surfaced was trust. Teams perform better working with a manager they trust, so without face-to-face opportunities to build relationships, project leaders have a problem.

This talk shares strategies practiced by me as a distributed exec leader, sprinkled with academic findings. These communication tactics will help project managers and leaders build trust and relationship with virtual teams.

If it was easy to improve business and project results, results would always improve. We know in reality, however, that is far from the case. Leaders understand the true power of managing the improvement of critical business results through project teams. That is why they seek to address the most difficult process improvement issues they face through the planning and execution of projects. By extension then, it stands to reason that those involved in those projects, including business analysts, should be trained in a process improvement methodology, and there is no better approach to process improvement than Lean Six Sigma. Though they may seem completely different, you’ll no doubt see that the disciplines of business analysis and Lean Six Sigma are, in fact, complementary. Through the “Leveraging Lean Six Sigma” session, you will explore concepts and tools that provide immediate value when applied at all levels of your organization’s projects and operations.

Process analysis is essential for any business change. As business analysts tackle this task, they often start with process flows. As processes grow more complex, so do the process flow diagrams. As we try to accommodate the needs of each persona, the processes get more intricate. As we collect more data, each new decision point contributes to making the process jungle denser and less penetrable.Embedded analytics allows to streamline the process while supporting decision-making in the context and in the moment. Business analysts can play a key role in this transformation – if they expand the scope of business analysis to embrace analytics.

Earlier in 2021, Margaret joined a new team of business analysts who were brought on board to launch a business analysis practice to support startup Skedulo’s customer implementations. In this presentation, Margaret will share the journey of how the team sold the benefits of business analysis and implemented the practice up front in a customer implementation. Margaret will share lessons learned and tips on how to sell (or re-sell) and implement (or re-implement) the practice of business analysis in organization – regardless of size.

Up to two-thirds of organisations struggle with turning their strategies into results, missing out on a potential performance increase of 60 to 100%. Yet without successful execution, the strategy is pointless. Indeed, strategy = execution.

Where should strategy become a reality? In change projects. With business analysis perfectly positioned to connect the dots from theory to practice, from idea to solution.

Enter the strategic BA, who helps the team in finding answers to the following questions:

• How do you formulate good goals, that guide execution without restricting creativity?
• How do you deal with stakeholders that know the solution before having investigated the problem?
• What is the importance of deep listening, and how do you do it?
• Why do we need to think about alternatives, and how do you facilitate their discovery?
• Should we still be doing projects? Is there a better alternative?

How do you manage an effective business analysis team? Scott Bennett has managed BA’s in three organizations and shares his keys to success in leading a BA team. With 20 years of experience as a BA, Scott discusses some useful tools and his insights about managing BA’s. Topics of this presentation include:

• The BA Manager Role
• Your Management Style
• Your Team Objectives
• Role Definitions for Your BA Team
• Coaching BA’s
• Business Analysis Center of Excellence (CoE) or Community of Practice (CoP)
• BA Standards & Templates
• Intake Process
• Your Network

High quality data is paramount for analytics that support public health strategic and operational decision-making. The CDC developed the Immunization Information Systems (IIS) Data Quality Blueprint which provides programmatic guidance to local immunization programs for improving quality of immunization data for their population. Additionally, detailed operational guidelines that support the IIS Data Quality Blueprint have been developed in collaboration with CDC partners, such as the AIRA.

This presentation will focus on application of popular business analysis techniques, such as concept models, business rules, and decision tables, to capture operational best practice recommendations for IIS on maintaining and improving data quality for incoming data as well as for data at rest.

You will learn:

• fundamental aspects of data quality
• leveraging business analysis techniques to analyze fundamental aspects
• dealing with data quality issues- tips to foster data quality culture.

The competitive job market will continue to intensify due to increased specialization of roles, skill-based competencies, and the global pool of labor. This is set to accelerate to the rapid impacts of COVID and the technology to quickly identify valid candidates out of the digital masses. Technology is changing rapidly and those poised to capitalized on a culture of continuous learning will have a path to climbing the corporate ladder. How can you stand out from the crowd? How do you prepare for what’s next? 

Join this session to learn how Google is shaking up traditional learning, the value of digital badges, and how certifications can not only boost your compensation, but also boost your confidence. See how today’s global trends point to a future where proving your worth with the right upskilling and certifications will change how you define your career. 

Learning Objectives: 

• How the job market is changing rapidly 
• Certifications can increase compensation, confidence, and marketability 
• Today’s trends and what that means for the future job market  

Research shows that Cybersecurity risks do not get the attention it is due, resulting in security breaches. In most cases, senior executives may not fully understand the security aspects and their implications, raising the key question as to who should make them see and how do we do that. Business Analysts present their analysis findings in a business case, and often Cybersecurity and risk controls are missed.A typical Cybersecurity business case usually involves adding new cybersecurity capabilities, maturing existing capabilities, or adding new cyber services. For BA’s working in product development, there are many opportunities to “shift left” with cybersecurity principles and controls, thereby bringing Cybersecurity into the discussion early on, as part of the business case, and into the user stories.

Facing an increase in business demand for software solutions and a shortage of skilled developers, organizations are turning to a low-code development approach. According to Gartner, the Codeless/No-code market will grow by 23% to nearly $13 billion and at least half of all new line-of-business applications will be created using low-code tools in 2021. Following the wide adoption of Agile and DevOps, this is the next major disruption to how solutions will be built. This new paradigm forces product owners & business analysts to play a central role in an extremely agile iterative approach.

In this session, you will:

• Understand how codeless systems work
• Experience codeless development live as we build a business application in 15 minutes
• Learn the evolving role and required skills of product owners & business analysts in codeless solution development 
• Hear what to expect in this space over the next 12 months

You’ve done the sticky note wall. You’ve done brainstorming. But have you taken the leap into the oasis to play games in sequence? This is beyond finding Halliday’s easter eggs and reigning supreme within the oasis. This is a real method you can use whether your goal is generating ideas, creating your product strategy, solving problems or making decisions. Games are a practical way to harness the creative and collaborative strengths of a group. Less talk, more play. More play, more collaboration. More collaboration, stronger teams. Stronger teams, stronger results. Start playing games that make a difference.

Nowadays it is common for business analysts to be in charge of development, testing, and ongoing maintenance of complex business decision models. However, whether you like it or not, your business decision models will contain bugs like regular software always does. They will fail to produce expected results under unforeseen circumstances. As a result, their authors will have troubles to understand why certain rules were not executed while others did. For real-world business models even the best explanation reports and execution traces would not be helpful to understand their behavior. What they need is a powerful while easy-to-use Rule Debugger to step through the execution of business decision models, pause it at any rule or ruleset, and inspect the state of the decision model. In this presentation we will demonstrate how business analysts can use a friendly graphical Rule Debugger to debug their business logic in business terms without becoming de-facto programmers.

The 2020 Women in Tech (WiT) track did not end with last year’s conference but ran continuously through 2021 with the BBC WiT Mentoring Circle. If you missed it, here is how you can find out about some of the insights we gained.

The WiT Mentoring Circle, which meets every 2 weeks, provides an environment to share, grow and learn together. Each session is led by a mentor covering topics such as personal branding, receiving/giving feedback, dealing with conflicts, giving powerful presentations, confidence building, negotiation, job search, and interviewing skills.

In this joint presentation, the mentors share their experiences and tips in a fun and lighthearted way.  You will learn practical skills to navigate ‘Women in Technology’. Come and learn from our mentors!

Learning Objectives:

·       What is personal branding and how to build yours

·       How to receive and give feedback effectively

·       Winning interviewing skills

·       Negotiation techniques

·       How to ask those tough questions

Did you know that the Visio Data Visualizer can create process maps for you automatically? Just point Visio at process data in Excel and Data Visualizer does the rest. Even better, the diagram and the data are synchronized so changes you make in one are synced to the other. It’s also possible to work entirely within Excel and create a Visio diagram without needing a Visio license! Come watch live demonstrations of flowcharts and swimlane diagrams being generated in real time. After this session you’ll be equipped to let Visio do most of the work for you when you need to create business process diagrams.

I am sure you have years of experience and run workshops regularly. You know the rules: to define a goal, write an agenda, identify stakeholders and designate roles.

I am sure you are a facilitator and you are working on this skill constantly. But, do you still have workshops where one person dominates your meetings? Do you feel that no one is engaged? Are the results still unclear? Do people say they don’t want to waste time? For tough workshops, do you prefer to invite an external moderator? If you answered yes at least once, then this case study is for you.

In my daily work I run around 2-5 workshops weekly. They are mostly with business leaders. They are for people who do not like to waste their time.

I discovered the secrets to workshop preparation. You will be surprised how much you can prepare before the workshop and that moderation is an easy thing to do without stress. I will share with you my life hacks gained over 15 years with a step-by-step guide using practical examples.

Cyber Security is one of the most important areas in todays corporate life. The fast-growing need to help companies mitigate their risk has created some new approaches for business analysts who possess the hard and soft skills needed to develop and maintain “build-in” security in the life of product development. In this talk we will present one of our case -studies where we combine Product-Lifecycle Management (PLM) end-to-end process with cyber security risks points and created a specific check-list for business analysts and security managers to identify the potential risk steps, task, environments, equipment or relations within the process. Based on that we even went further and planned the appropriate protection scenario and internal procedures to detect, respond and recover in case of cybersecurity breach. Case will clearly present, that the role of BA and business analysis is playing a key role in helping organizations prevent a cyber-attack and to build in product development.

The answer is yes, if your organization is committed to these emerging practices and technologies and the right information architecture is prioritized to enable value in your investment. A knowledge graph is a way to store and visualize enterprise knowledge in terms of entities and their semantic relationships. This powerful tool can drive all kinds of business analysis to unlock innovation, achieve cost savings, and manage risks. Not a replacement for traditional data lakes and warehouses, knowledge graphs can accelerate the time to analyze critical information sources not readily available in these environments. In this session, you’ll discover a path to semantically richer and new forms of business analyses.

The immensely popular Women in Technology (WiT) panel continues for the third year with a fresh set of voices.  Over the last year, a lot has changed – including how we see ourselves and our careers.  For many, working from home has changed their view of what success looks like, how they balance their goals, and what they want from their future work life.  Our panel of industry vets will talk about their experiences and engage with the audience in a Q&A session to address how these changes have affected them.

The panel will focus on some takeaways from this very unusual year – what worked, what didn’t – and how it has impacted their work life and career goals.  Some of the topics the panel will touch on include:

·       Changes in corporate culture

·       Challenges and opportunities in remote work

·       Balancing home and work

·       Reevaluating career paths

Today’s business entities are required to achieve their business benefit in align with the pursuit of social-good value as SDGs show. This case study presentation will explain our experience of collaborative design of social value to action to solve the social problem.We designed socialized will of participants through Philosopher Kant’ Conative (Future vision), Affective (Stakeholder value) and Cognition (Articulated requirement) combined with the open agile business design Takumi method. We will explain how we externalized participants’ internal thoughts as explicit knowledge from 3 Kant’s views and collaboratively make it common and socialized and what outcome were achieved through this process.

Join IIBA’s President & CEO as he poses how IIBA views some of the burning questions of the day and engages with the audience to surface how we’re all dealing with them.