Review - BBC 2023 Agenda

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

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

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

Business Architecture provides a strong foundation for business-wide transformation, digitization and optimization and is the basis for having an agile business. Given the inherent complexities, making the right choices in what to change is not simple. Avoiding duplication and sub-optimization means that all of the moving parts must be classified, well understood and inter-connected before change can confidently begin. Business Architecture subject areas are numerous. Processes and capabilities and other important domains are complex enough. Being able to find the interconnections among them is even more so. A well-formed Business Architecture can help untangle the confusion and deliver inherently adaptable solutions.

This session will introduce some of the critical elements needed:

• Stakeholder Value Orientation
• Business Concepts / Information models
• Business Processes
• Business Capabilities
• Business Measurement
• Change Prioritization
• Process / Capability Alignment

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

During this session you’ll hear techniques for:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our goal is to maximize the value of the product, but what does that even mean? Some of it is straightforward: more revenue, engaged customers, maybe even a better planet. We should also think about maintaining the technical applications. Remember that the team should keep their skills sharp. And your customers won’t let you forget their proposed changes to the product. How does a Product Owner have time for all of it?

Product Ownership is harder than it looks. In this session, we’ll review the basics of Product Ownership and talk about what it’s really like as a PO. We’ll look at practical ways to make the most of what precious time is available to you and to the team. We all have too much to do.  It’s time to get real about how to actually succeed as a Product Owner.

This session will cover the design and development of knowledge systems to support the development of artificial intelligence applications.  These approaches also apply to traditional knowledge base design as well as artificial intelligence powered bots and virtual assistants.  These AI applications run on knowledge and data. Projects without the necessary prerequisites will not meet expectations or fail outright. 

This tutorial is about taking a journey from lessons learned and the shortcomings of traditional KM, to the opportunities and new horizons of emerging technologies. You will walk away thoroughly informed about the past, present and future of knowledge capabilities in the organization.

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

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

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

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

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

In this session you will learn how to:

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

The rise of new data science techniques and applications for data-driven decision making is gaining increasing attention. But also the modeling and automation of the numerous small decisions the business has to take every day remains important. Decision modeling enables this decision transformation in the digital world. And it does so in a way which ensures correctness, consistency and compliance from the start.

With increasing demand for business process automation, the need for the automation of routine business decisions grows even more. In order to improve and speed up processes, also decisions have to be improved and automated. The business logic of those decisions must be captured effectively and correctly by the business. Decision table models offer unique features such as consistency, completeness, correctness.

This tutorial takes you from the secrets behind knowledge-based decision intelligence to decision table methodology, including best practices, examples and experiences

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

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

In this session, you will learn how to: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tik Tok.  YouTube.  Instagram.  Facebook.  Twitter.  iPhone.  iPad.  Android. These distractions have led to an audience with a short attention span. Studies have shown that most people will skim through the first paragraph and move on, unless they are “grabbed” by something that matters to them.

The situation is even worse with executives.  They simply have no time at all.  How do you get your central points across to them fast?

In this workshop, you will learn tips and practices to say more with less. You’ll be able to apply these techniques to create impactful elevator pitches and presentations that will grab and maintain the scarce attention of your audience.

The advancement of AI technology will have an impact on all organizations. What does that mean for the role business analysis professionals play in improving business outcomes? What’s new and showing promise? Will these tools help encourage or hinder human connections?

Susan and Scott, from IIBA’s Business Analysis Live series, will lead an intriguing discussion on the exciting opportunities and obstacles facing business analysis in the era of AI. Fabricio Laguna, “the Brazilian BA”, joins them with insight into his recent experiments on the value of ChatGPT to business analysis. Join us to gain insight into this rapidly evolving field and what it means for you and your organization. 

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

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

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

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

Join this session to learn:

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

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

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

Are business users capable of creating their own reports and dashboards with very little training and if so, which business intelligence data platform do they prefer? These were the questions a local governments IT department set out to answer at the start of FY 2020.  The vision was to enable business units to improve citizen transparency and make evidence-based decisions by making organizational data discoverable and accessible and putting it in the hands of the people who needed it when they needed it. 

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

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

Join Nemi George from Pacific Dental Services (PDS) for their session on Accelerating Your Transformation with Enterprise Architecture. He’ll be sharing how PDS looked to improve their implementation of effective EA practices and some of the challenges they faced and how they overcame those challenges. Nemi will share how his team has tackled these challenges, including strategic planning, enhanced cross functional collaboration opportunities, and a comprehensive application portfolio management initiative – as well as inspirational and best practice views of how the team at PDS structures their EA within BlueDolphin.

Transforming your operating model is more than redesigning business processes.  Entirely new or matured capabilities may be required to enable the new business strategy. In this mini workshop, you’ll have a chance to learn and practice how to use business capabilities as a bridge between a desired strategy and executing your target operating model.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What you will learn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business Architecture, like other promising methods from past, is ripe with great opportunity for organizations to get their act together and thrive. It is also full of misleading protestations from incumbents and newbies, many with vested interests, dogmatic mindsets and frankly, a lot of promises that just do not work well in reality. Many practitioners advocate overly-simple methods that aim to solve complex challenges that are more hope than strategy. This is an area that can easily become academic, where inflexible methodology seems to be more important than practicality. In this session, Roger Burlton an experienced pioneer in applying pragmatic Business Architecture practices, will take us through a journey of dashed hopes and realistic alternatives that can be trusted to deliver. He will focus on an approach that can adapt to each organization’s particular scenario, with its unique pressures, expectations, maturity, resistance, readiness, opportunities and risks. You can expect some controversy so come and participate in the discussion.

• What are the potholes to be aware of?
• What works better?
• How to change some intransigent minds?

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

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

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

Data sits squarely between business and technology and, if used correctly, it can facilitate the flow of information across an organization and bolster decision making. If used incorrectly, however, it may cause confusion and slow down essential processes. How do we ensure that, technically and culturally, our organizations are using data to enrich their capabilities and not weigh them down? What tools, techniques, and processes have been helpful to you? In this session, Vanessa Lam will lead a discussion amongst data professionals and data stakeholders to share experiences and best practices from a diverse set of industries. Bring your tough data questions to discuss with peers in a supportive and curiosity-driven environment!

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

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

Data modeling is the process of identifying and documenting the data within our initiatives. As our architectures get more complex, data modeling becomes more important. Our traditional data modeling approach, however, falls short of modeling the full range of data solutions. Without a standard approach, many organizations take extreme positions from avoiding modeling altogether to spending way too much time on modeling.

Instead, what is needed is an approach that gracefully accommodates data modeling principles and goals when applied to any initiative. I call this the Align > Refine > Design approach. That is, the proven principles of modeling applied to our complex data architecture. 

You will learn:·          

• The value of Align in capturing a common business vocabulary          
• The value of Refine in documenting the business requirements          
• The value of Design in creating an efficient database structure

No data modeling experience necessary. It will be educational and yes, even fun!

Have you ever encountered any of these scenarios?

• Balancing foundational and strategic capability needs
• Building product roadmap effectively without knowing what capabilities are available
• Proactively accounting for dependencies and synergies at play
• Optimizing investment in common needs and determining when to solve for capability gaps at an enterprise level vs. one-off solution approaches

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

Do you feel the cards are stacked against a project before it starts? Too often, priorities are decided without proper planning. Decades of this culture don’t change quickly, so how do you start the shift? In this session, we’ll discuss our assessment process – an essential piece of any successful plan or project. Our assessment is built on a foundation of relationships, strategy, and business capabilities, while enabling a greater transparency and use of our enterprise architecture. We’ll demonstrate how our assessment process bridges strategy and execution to facilitate strategic discussions, ensure prioritized business outcomes, and outline technology roadmaps through partnership with business units. Join us, as we share our assessment process, including deliverables, skills, and lessons learned. Finally, we’ll outline an actionable plan for your next initiative.

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

In 1966, Ford began to race its now legendary GT40 in the European circuits, but had trouble winning races. Earlier in the century, Allied troops began to notice a staggering number of their fighter jets being shot down over occupied Europe. Earlier still, 1850s Londoners struggled with the spreading Cholera pandemic. The solution that proved successful in all three instances, was found in metrics. Today we use metrics to define success and failures of our organizations. But throughout history the use (or misuse in some cases) of metrics, had varied results. This session proposes to look at how each of the three situations implemented the RIGHT solutions,  solved their problems, and declared victory over their challenges. Moreover this presentation will cover basic misunderstandings of metrics, and how to implement measures and processes that add value to a given organization. Finally, this presentation will cover how these same methodologies have been implemented into state gov.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This talk will:

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

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

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

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

This presentation will provide an actionable 12-month roadmap to getting from a culture that is distrustful of its data to one that uses it to drive decisions.

Culture work is not a magic bullet, but a slow and steady march towards improving peoples’ relationship with data. We will discuss how to assess your own data culture, timelines, steps, and signs that your efforts are yielding results.

Learning Objectives:

• 12-month actionable roadmap towards improving data culture
• Tips and templates to facilitate communication with stakeholders and executives
• Long-term actions for data culture maintenance

The ability to transform and build clear enterprise capabilities requires insight into how an organization is connected.

Learn about an organization’s digital transformation journey using a case study approach. Discussion and demonstration will show how to reduce ambiguity around business data and how to turn it into digital transformation opportunities using architecture. Further discussion will show how line-of-sight models provide insight and considerations for resourcing organizational capabilities and supporting strategic enterprise outcomes.

In this session, we’ll discuss institutionalizing the architecture capability. Participants will see how to present architecture to assist in capability building to stakeholders and senior leaders. 

Learning Objectives:

• Develop Line of Sight models to provide a clear view of capability and transformation requirements
• Learn how to identify transformation opportunities and talk about risk and resource allocation.
• Understand the impact of “stranded data” in today’s connected organization

Are you a senior business analyst who is trying to figure out what is next in their career? Whether you are looking for a new role, or just furthering your business analysis skills, this session is for you. Business Relationship Management embodies the competencies, skills, mindsets, and behaviors that foster productive, value-producing relationships. It is a belief that the development of strong relationships provide the greatest impact to increasing value for the organization. A business relationship manager’s purpose is to develop and nurture strong relationships to create a culture that encourages a shared ownership to achieve results. BRM’s drive value through the discovery of new solutions, nurture existing assets to ensure value is received and help the organization create a culture of limitless growth and improvement.

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

Learning Objectives:

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

Fostering successful data and AI projects requires a healthy Data Fabric, based on both culture and infrastructure, and aligning the enterprise data strategy to the business strategy. After introducing the key concepts and principles, we explore how specific customer insights served by the Data Fabric can also play a direct role in business automation capabilities. Based on real-life use cases, we address how to use and apply the Data Fabric to workflow and decision automation, what resulting improvements they can expect, and what are potential pitfalls to watch for.

Achieving a desired target state means shifting from today’s operating model to a new model that supports the strategic vision. Centric uses a multi-disciplinary approach that leverages fields such as Strategy, Business Architecture, and Organizational Design to provide a holistic view of how capabilities across People, Process, Technology, Information, Structure, and Performance Metrics need to change.  The speakers will present a case study showing how our methodology helped a client to clarify their strategy and align their operating model to execute effectively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a billboard in downtown Toronto we once spotted “In every career there are 1,645 Mondays. Enjoy more of them” Perhaps it is a mindset shift to be more positive.  That must be it – a positive mindset ! Say the words and it is done. Oh, if only it were that simple.

We are often reminded to take ownership of our own career. The paradox is we often join organisations on the promise the employer develops our career. We are often reminded to take time out to focus on career. The contradiction is we are assigned demanding deadlines. Afterall if you want a job done, give it to a busy person – right? We are often reminded to challenge ourselves and try new things.  The irony is we are often ‘rewarded’ for getting a good outcome by being asked to replicate it again and again and again…

What is the role of our managers and leaders? What is our role? What does the literature say? What is your experience?

Join the Myth Busters – Susan and Michael – as they debunk the Myths, explore the Mysteries and unleash the Magic of Your Career Journey

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

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

What’s the cost to your enterprise of staff (and leaders) making a wrong decision? What’s the cost of delaying a decision for a week? A month? Or longer? What’s the cost of not implementing (or fully implementing) a correct decision? Who in your organization is ensuring that these situations do not occur?

Teaching staff and leaders how to optimize the entire decisioning process — from “what is the business value question?” to “identifying a meaningful actionable insight” to “assessing the effectiveness of insight implementation” is a key role for BAs to take on, especially since the decisioning process is rarely documented or actively managed. Imagine the financial benefits to your enterprise if you could decrease the percentage of wrong decisions, reduce decision delays, or accelerate implementation of insights!

Objectives:

• Explain how to ask the right business-value question so individuals and teams obtain a financial benefit.
• Outline three kinds of insights within a data set and why “meaningful, actionable” insights are most important to obtaining business value.
• Outline why business storytelling, not data visualization, sparks a decision to be made faster.

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

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

As business professionals, we know the feeling of being the only person with an in-depth understanding of a given topic. That’s our job! We’ve been told that this gives us job security and ensures us that we’re always needed. But what if it’s also hindering our careers and lives?

Lack of knowledge sharing within teams and larger organizations exposes our colleagues to key-person risk and limits us from stepping away from our roles (even for vacation)! Investing in processes to share and retain topic knowledge across teams lowers risks to teams and enables managers to promote/move high-quality employees without fear of negatively impacting business functions.    

In this presentation, we will discuss the organizational and personal benefits of knowledge sharing within teams and organizations. We will also talk about how, as both a leader and as the “key-person”, to build knowledge sharing/retention processes and a culture of knowledge sharing.   

Learning Objectives

• Identify the primary benefits of  knowledge sharing within teams and organizations
• Enable the audience to identify instances where knowledge sharing and retention are not happening through examples  
• Develop tools the audience can use to build knowledge retention & sharing processes and a culture of knowledge sharing

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

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

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

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

Business rules represent institutional knowledge and provide the structure to think through content effectively. Compared to many other formal instruments of business analysis, business rules that are expressed in structured natural language offer unrivaled user-friendliness for a non-technical audience. At the same time, implementation of the business rules methodology often results in a large number of business rules that can be challenging to work with and reference.

This presentation will focus on creative application of various pragmatic approaches for managing business rules that were successfully tested and implemented in immunization information systems (IIS) projects at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Some examples of these approaches include a hierarchical organization of business rules, grouping rules along phases and steps of process models, elements of concept models, and other business analysis models.

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

Easy to say, hard to implement? Right?

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

So, how to make it work?

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

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

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

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

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

Key Takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhere in the life of a digital transformation initiative a transition takes place from surviving to thriving. The first go-live will feel much different after two hundred promotions to production. Now the organization must live with the solution. For example, living with automation requires the same rigor and careful execution as the initial phases. What’s in the backlog after go-live? We find a list of important deferred features, bugs, and technical debt. Many tasks remain manual and while the finish line approached, the team expended little toward automating the lifecycle or tracking data for business impact. Long-term success requires a broad view of the investment across teams and activities making sure the effort doesn’t drift or get mired in manual activities. Most importantly the team must finish the work required to confirm the business case. Good Beginnings is a practice series focused on building successful delivery with exceptional impact.

Learning objectives:

• How to baseline a team on North star objectives
• How to frame both the problem and solution for impact
• How to leverage models (DMN, ML Explanations, and BPMN) to greater effect and stakeholder awareness
• How to share the business case with stakeholders and demonstrate objectives were met

The SAFe framework is becoming more and more popular with organizations in their quest for business agility, shorter time to market and competitive threats. If your organization has embraced it, you are probably wondering where the BA role and the business analysis activities fit and are all our BA tools still needed.

This presentation will walk through the SAFe core concepts, highlighting areas of the framework where the business analyst brings value. The presenter will share her experience using examples from the field and will navigate key areas of the SAFe framework, roles and concepts that successfully position the business analyst as a key contributor to business agility.