BA & Beyond

Organizations are racing to become digital and embed data in decision-making. However, it's becoming apparent that merely investing money in technology and staffing isn't effective. In fact, Randy Bean and Tom Davenport titled a 2019 Harvard Business Review article, "Companies are Failing in Their Efforts to Become Data-Driven." The research they cite didn't say, "What’s needed is more data," or "Companies need to buy more sophisticated technology." Instead, it says that people AND processes are the number one obstacle.

Did you know that:

• Being data-driven is an impossible goal … and that another outcome can drive cultural success?
• The OSEMN approach which data science uses to explore data doesn't guarantee valuable business insights will emerge or be actionable?
• Communicating insights from a data inquiry will likely fall flat if data in any form is included?

If you want to learn what to do instead, this keynote is for you.

In this lively talk, Lori will reveal several "mythconceptions" that we are routinely taught to believe. Learn about a needed role that Business Analysts can play in helping organizations drive transformation and solve complex business problems through a more connected culture and meaningful and measurable business outcomes from data.

Keynote Outcomes

• Identify why the brain ignores data and what to do instead to be heard when communicating data.
• Outline a process for successfully moving from data to insight, insight to decision, decision to deployment, and deployment to delivery (action).
• Describe why business analysts are perfectly poised to become data translators/interpreters and steps to take to make this role a reality.

Have you been asked to communicate a business case steeped in data?

Do you need to keep people energized and engaged while sharing a bunch of numbers?

Are you trying to transform analytical results into information that's meaningful and gets people to make a decision and do something different?

It’s not enough to wrap graphics and fancy data visualizations around data and deliver them in a dashboard, report, or PowerPoint presentation. All data has a voice. How do you get it to speak? To be heard? And to motivate people to do something different?

First, you need to extrapolate meaning from data. Then you must transform this meaning — these insights — into compelling stories that move people to shift their thinking and change their behavior. Learn what’s needed to transform data to more easily get your point across — get decision made faster — and spark action.

Workshop outcomes

• Outline the decision/problem the data is answering in a way that resonates with stakeholders’ business needs.
• Identify the contextual questions that need to be asked to move team members and stakeholders from data to insight.
• Uncover three different types of insights within data from the observations that present themselves.
• Strategize how to best relay insights to others to more quickly spark a decision and action.

In his landmark article, 'No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering,' Fred Brooks made the point that business analysis will always be challenging. Why? Because it's relatively easy to describe the 'who' and 'how' of the current state – this person does something using that tool, then that person does something using another tool, and so on.

What's difficult – often very difficult – is figuring out what is actually being accomplished. And that makes building a useful future state almost impossible. Sometimes, our business clients are so immersed in their job and how they do it they've literally lost sight of what is really being done. That's why the speaker has concluded, after more than 35 years of business analysis, a fundamental ability of great BAs is separating the 'what' from the 'who', 'how', and 'why'.

Backed up by numerous real-life examples, this tutorial will provide practical techniques and frameworks for getting to the essence in a variety of business analysis challenges.

Key learning points include demonstrating how getting to the essence helps by:

• Keeping people from diving into unhelpful detail while analyzing the “as-is” state;
• Making your use cases / user stories more useful, and not drifting into the “Useless Case” zone;
• Ensuring evaluation and selection of purchased solutions (“COTS”) is focused on “what” must be provided to support the business;
• Freeing people from barnacle-like attachment to the current state during organisational or process change initiatives.