BA & Beyond

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Normal is such a basic idea that it is hardly ever analysed as a problem. Yet, as governments and businesses have discovered, Normal has both consequences and costs. Embedding Divergence into business processes is the path to both profit and resilience.

This talk looks at the problematic history of Normal and the hopeful future of Diversity. Using strategic examples from UK government and international businesses, the talk will show why Normal cannot help but create problems and how Divergence fixes problems and creates opportunities. As well as showing the problems, this talk will offer solutions thru both policy and process examples.

Come along and think about a Post-Normal future.

• Normal is a problem
• Divergence creates resilience
• We have the frameworks for a Post-Normal future

Packaged software implementations can deliver excellent, even transformational, results. Sometimes… not so much. 

Our speaker has seen organisations spend $25M, $100M, $500M, and, in the most extreme case, over $3B on selecting and implementing purchased software that simply didn’t work, or worked so poorly the organisation was worse off than before. 

When called in to help with these troubled projects, Alec finds the reasons leading to failure are surprisingly consistent, and always surprising to the organisation.  Not understanding the end-to-end process(es) being supported is an extremely common factor. This presentation will present examples of process-based techniques that have resolved these difficulties, and techniques that have avoided them in the first place!

Even more surprising is the Number One reason for failure in purchased software implementations – be sure to attend this short, focused session to learn what that is!

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.

The Business Analyst holds a key position within the project team for several reasons. Do we perceive the Business Analyst with his/her strong influence as a saboteur or as an ambassador of change?

This inspiring session for business analysts is all about how to deal with change management, putting aside the theory and start with deep-diving into reality and the people side of a project.

Key take-aways

• Talk people, not business.
• Dare to play.
• Focus.

Is your company always focused on one-time opportunities? Are you always unclear on what requirements to clarify next? Projects changing all the time? I've been there.

In April 2019 I joined an Artificial Intelligence company which was mainly driven by sales opportunities with no focus on long-term goals. You can imagine how difficult it was for me to define product requirements that made sense in the long-run and to write user stories that met teams' "definition of ready".

In this talk I want to share one technique that helped me aligning stakeholders towards priorities and being clear of what was coming next: RICE prioritization. I will share my struggles and successes on getting there.

RPA has become a very popular solution to Business problems, traditionally RPA would look to automate onerous repetitive tasks where human expertise and intervention is not required, and can deliver significant operational improvements and savings.

Within my department we combine RPA with visual analytics of robotic performance to drive even greater benefits and increased transparency of performance.

What is the BA role when the Business approaches and just asks for a robot?

What does this mean for the BA role delivering in this area, how to tackle the analysis, what deliverables are useful?

RPA needs to move on from a short-term solution to being the strategic option, is this achievable?

• How do we stop stakeholders just asking for a robot (identify the problem not the solution)?
• How to identify if it is a good process to automate?
• How is benefits realisation managed?

If processes are the value creation engine of the organisation, then data is the fuel. Data is the critical resource for almost any organisation and should be managed as such. Organizations embarking on the data management journey often complain about yet another management framework to take into account, expecting more work, more overhead, more investment, and less agility. They couldn’t be further from the truth.

In this talk, Bas will show that there is a vast body of practical guidance (theory, cases) that can be leveraged for building a data management capability. He will also show that people are the key to the balancing act between strategy and execution, business and IT, and between a top-down and bottom-up approach to data management.

Learning points

• Theory is an excellent source for building an effective data management capability.
• Building an effective data management capability is a balancing act: top-down vs bottom-up, business vs IT, strategy vs execution.
• Data management is all about the people: do this well, or accept that you won't get anywhere.

Successfully designing, deploying and launching AI solutions in organizations and on markets remains quite a challenge today. Although AI algorithms have been around for 40 years, there is still room for improvement to understand the key concepts of successfull AI initiatives.

In our AI improvement journey, we propose a smart guide for analyzing, architecting and launching successfull AI solutions. Understanding the total spectrum of AI makes it easier to understand why we need the “all inclusive appoach”, where all business domains are involved and must work together in co-creation.

As consistency and alignment are key, we introduce insights into the new way of working, where transparency, co-creation, trust and sharing (instead of owning) are fundaments for effective and efficient solution design.

• Smart drives healthy organizations.
• Artificial Intellification: from vision through process to value.
• Nature is the biggest source of intelligence: welcome to the artificial marriage.

Technology is not neutral: it can change our society and our behaviour. The changes caused by the emergence of smartphones have clearly illustrated this in the past decennium. Today, Artificial Intelligence and other data-driven applications are increasingly determining the way we live.

In recent history, AI systems caused considerable controversy e.g. because of their role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or the high level of political oppression in China based on facial recognition. While these examples are extreme and exceptional, AI also changes our world in many smaller ways. AI systems are part of many applications most of us use on a daily basis. The technology has a potential societal impact that is unprecedented, and call for an in-depth societal debate.

In this session, we try to find an answer on how society can reap the benefits of this still emerging technology and allow for innovation, without threatening our democratic values and fundamental human rights. What can AI do, what can’t it do (yet), and does this technology require new ethical and legal instruments? What legal and ethical instruments are already available and which ones are needed to ensure a beneficial impact of AI?

A Visual presentation of a "Multi Dimensional Framework" for End-to-End Analysis with ArchiMate, BPMN (DMN, CMMN), UML.

By defining data only once, multiple roles can access the same information on another way by using "Traceability" to the limit.

By re-using elements out-of-the-library "Re-usability" in other formats (for Role specific use) and levels (Depth of modeling) can be used optimaly.

Deciding it's time for a career change is never a decision anyone takes lightly. How do you know it is the right time to change your career path and how will you navigate it?

The truth is nobody knows "when" is the right time, rather understanding that it is the right thing for you.

Key messages

• It is never too early or too late to make a career change.
• Facing challenges in a new career path is normal, other people face these challenges too.
• Understanding how a Business Analyst fits in an Agile Digital environment.

Imagine your business stakeholder has an idea. In a classic approach, you help create a business case, with lots of information that is based on, honestly, assumptions. Because even with the best of intentions and a detailed up front analysis, we cannot exactly predict the future.

In an agile approach, we accept there’s a lot we don’t know up front. So how do we (help) estimate the project? What’s the agile alternative for following up on scope, time and cost? How can we stay in control without sacrificing flexibility and responsiveness to changes? And what is the BA’s role in all this?

Together with Damien, we will discover that agile is not in contradiction with scope management, budgeting and control. Rather, it can lead to more transparency and visibility, and help us get to better business decisions more easily.

As business analysts we often hear the business complain about the IT department and their solutions. The IT department, for example, is often found to be unresponsive enough, whereas their solutions often don't capture the actual complexity of a problem. On the other hand, we hear the IT department complain about a continuously increasing workload. Using the capabilities of Model Driven Engineering, the realization of software using modeling tools alone, we enable both parties to focus on their own domain, decreasing the gap between them.​

In this topic we will discuss how case management, business process management and decision management can be applied effectively in low code platforms to enable the business to define and maintain their business logic and how to enthuse the IT department about such platforms.

Despite proven process management and information technology (IT) methodologies, excellent modeling tools, and robust modeling notations (like BPMN), and despite all the well-intentioned efforts of business analysts and modeling participants, there still are a lot of ineffective business process models out there.

Why?

More than anything else, a business process model’s quality relies upon the competence of the business or process analyst. Competence is marked by an effective, consistently practiced approach for producing a business process model in the face of unique project dynamics.

This practical session will help you to produce high-quality business process models within any BPM or IT project methodology by adopting a defined and proven approach. It will empower you with:

• Universal Business Process Modeling Procedure and Universal Process Definition
• Razor-Sharp Process Model Elicitation Agendas and Quality Criteria
• BPMN Patterns for the Top Process Model Refinements

Good software is not only error-free software, but more importantly software that does what the customer needs. This seems obvious, but in reality, the communication gap between business professionals and software development teams still causes a loss of time, money and good will.

Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) tries to bridge the gap between the different stakeholders.

At UCLL, we started a research project to promote this methodology with Belgian companies. We are strong believers and try to find out why BDD it is not more widely used. The goal is to develop an ‘implementation model’, a set of best practices, do’s and don’ts, helping companies to successfully distill high-quality specifications that can guide the development and testing process from the start of a project.

We would love to share our experiences, talk about the problems we come across, and discuss the way we handle them.

Key messages

• We believe BDD does help to close the communication gap between customers and development teams, and builds trust between the different parties involved.
• In reality, companies use it more often for automated testing while too little attention is paid to the core: the quality of the specifications.
• We want to help companies to implement BDD successfully by sharing lessons learned in real-life cases.

Does this sound familiar?

• You have started a check in process in every meeting, but after a couple of times people are saying “not again …”
• You end your meeting well, half an hour later you pass by the coffee machine and notice that participants have started the discussion all over again…
• You want to include everyone in a discussion, but it seems impossible to involve your more silent colleagues.
• You want to energize your meetings and workshops and keep everyone engaged.

What is this workshop about?

• Get to know the principles of facilitation
• Work on your facilitation skills
  • Deep listening skills
  • Learn to balance result and process
• Fill your backpack with practical tools that you can use in your organisation
• Energize your meetings and workshops and keep participants engaged
• Co-design the facilitation approach for the conference the next day

For who?

• Analysts, product owners, CX and UX designers, agile coaches, team leaders, people managers, junior trainers, …
• Everyone who is keen on discovering and improve their facilitation skills, to get more out of their meetings, coachings, workshops, …

What you will get

• A boost for your facilitation skills
• A 1-day dynamic workshop
• Grow your confidence when intervening during difficult meetings, discussions
• Theoretical frameworks and practical application
• Tips & tricks that you can immediately apply
• Share experiences and learn from each other
• The opportunity to immediately apply what you have learned during the BA & Beyond conference the next day, volunteers will get a spot as facilitator during interactive sessions to share insights from the talks.

This full day workshop includes free access to the Brussels conference on 26 March for participants that take up a facilitator role at the conference.

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 in 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?

This talk

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

Building your BA community, would that work best through top-down design and roll-out, or through (inter)active discussion and collaboration between the people that make up your community? Let's try the second approach, build on each other's ideas and experiences, and challenge them to improve them.

Ritual Dissent is a workshop method designed to rapidly test and enhance proposals, stories, ideas or whatever by subjecting them to ritualised dissent (challenge) or assent (positive alternatives). Your idea is being discussed and challenged by a group of peers while you are facing away from the group, thereby depersonalising feedback, forcing you to listen and preventing you from participating in the discussion to defend your idea.

Expect

• to participate in a highly interactive discussion;
• to get tips from your peers on how to build your BA Community;
• to experience an engaging group facilitation technique!

Since the decision of the Flemish government in 2015 to establish a shared HR service center for all Flemish departments and agencies, this HR agency (“AgO”) is growing every year, welcoming new HR staff every time.

To tackle the challenges that accompany this huge transformation, such as the integration of new staff in the organisation and the alignment and standardisation of processes while keeping all operations running, AgO decided to become a process oriented organisation, focussing on the power of processes.

This presentation shows the road that AgO has travelled so far and gives a view on the next steps.

Key messages:

• Plan for change
• Think end-2-end (for processes)
• Communication & training is essential

Who says Agile, says iterations. Who says iterations, says continuous change. IT Systems developed under the Agile paradigm, must support continuous change, or after some iterations, the system is no longer evolvable, no longer produces value and breaks. The question thus becomes, how can you make sure your system will be evolvable ? During this talk I want to share with you:

• What evolvability actually is?
• What are the necessary conditions for evolvability?
• What you need to change in the way of development, to have evolvability.

This talk goes beyond “make loose coupling” and “use REST API”, and focuses and real and actionable advice on how to build evolvable systems.

In this session we will present a pragmatic analysis approach to demonstrate how you can effectively move from business analysis towards implementation with the help of CMMN (Case Management and Model Notation). We will show several examples of Case Management implementations in Ground lion (case management software) where it’s assumed in the analysis that in some cases standard functionalities can be used, but that other cases may require customization. We will explain how to optimally use the open CMMN standard as well as how to draw a line between standard functionalities and customization in the analysis.

Key Messages

• Case Management Model and Notation — CMMN
• Low code development / Rapid Application development
• From Business analysis to implementation as a whole

Are your meetings, workshops and discussions engaging and invigorating? Do they provide space for good ideas to emerge and flourish?

Conventional structures and habits are often either inhibiting or too loose and not leading to actionable results. Frustrations and the feeling that time and money is being wasted are often a consequence of these approaches.

Collaboration and co-creation approaches like liberating structures and world cafe offer a better way that is designed to include everyone and get to results. Their techniques are practical and easy to learn by design, so that everyone can apply them at every level in an organisation, both in small and large groups. They encourage everyone to contribute and enable you to connect diverse perspectives by encouraging true listening and sharing.

In our immersion workshops, we will not just tell you about these techniques. Rather, you will experience them yourself and learn everything you need to practice them yourself in your own organisation.

You will be able to take home some new and refreshing ideas to make your discussions and meetings more engaging and inviting. We will offer you a source of inspiration.

Fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the ride!

Empathy; the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation.

Analysts who apply empathy in their work can do magic, especially in large and complex organisations. But what does it mean, to apply empathy in business analysis tasks? We have all learned that listening to end users and managing stakeholder expectations is important. Yet we continue to communicate through requirement documents, invite participants to interactive workshops in a hostile environment, create email conversations with extensive CC audiences....

In this talk Ines will share what true empathy looks like in the tasks of a business analyst and how the devil is, as always, in the details.

The pressure to innovate. The necessary and constant pressure that keeps the organisation on the market and keeps the jobs.

Feels like an obstacle race, full speed ahead, without having always a well defined finish line.

The ideas need good will, proper space and time to form. Innovation is not on-demand.

The good will comes from the people, the innovators. The space and time come from the organisation.

Innovation is a joined endeavour, each bringing something to the table:

• What should each bring?
• When?
• How should everything be put together to make the organisation an innovative one? One that has the innovation by default.

This presentation/workshop is about mapping the consequences of antifragility for the profession of the modern business analyst. An antifragile system or organisation has the ability to become stronger as a result of unexpected events, malfunctions and errors. In other words, 'what does not kill you, makes you stronger'. But most organisations and systems are designed to deal exclusively with known risks. And process designers and IT departments have invested heavily in preventing errors. What would happen if you designed a system while assuming that all components can and will fail. And additionally generate random failures to test the resilience of the system. The Chaos Monkey, designed by Netflix, is one of the best - technical - examples in this field.

According to management consulting firm McKinsey, 70% of change projects don’t reach their goals. Even when there is a good business process and project methodology, the number doesn’t go down to zero.

So, we are overlooking something.

In this interactive session Jan Vermeiren will share:

• The three most important overlooked reasons why change projects don’t reach their goals.
• The myth of resistance to change.
• How to detect up front where team members or stakeholders might clash.
• The D.U.E.T. framework that helps to increase the success ratio.

Once you know this, projects will go a lot smoother!

Every participant will also receive a DIY Assessment.

For centuries humans have crossed oceans, fought dragons and given up kingdoms to be part of folklore. Yet when we build products, services or teams we often do so with little consideration for the narrative & then struggle to understand why no one wants in.

In a world where people are bombarded with information, options and content feeds, what cuts through all the noise? What sets your organisation and its value proposition apart? What truly makes people look up and pay attention?

In this session, we dig into some of the ideas and principles that guide a good narrative in the quest of finding alternative ways for analysis practitioners to influence strategy and drive meaningful change.

Key takeaways

• Learn why storytelling is such a valuable tool in the information age.
• Understand the connection between narrative and the products/services we build.
• Learn about four key principles from storytelling that business analysis practitioners can apply in their day-to-day efforts to drive their teams and organisations forward.

In 1999 Bill Gates wrote a book about Business at the Speed of Thought. Nearly 20 years later, yes, technology is the digital nervous system of business, but what’s next? How can we motivate our teams, partners and customers to achieve their goals and ours? Let’s apply our natural need for achievement, socialization and mastery into a how we work. Less talk, more play. More play, more collaboration. More collaboration, stronger teams. Stronger teams, stronger results. Start playing games that make a difference.

• How to engage everyone from business partners to customers in collaborative games.
• How to focus and adapt game techniques to your audience.
• How to quickly convert game output into real work products.

Business architecture looks at organisations with a strategic-tactical view. This view is indispensable for the proper and effective implementation of the strategy. The analyst uses the business architecture and the architect uses the analysis, but how are they aligned. How is the coherence and cooperation ensured?

In this presentation we will discuss the collaboration between analyst and architect, each from his own perspective. we will use the path from concept to realisation as a common thread to discuss various aspects of this collaboration.

• What are the services an architect and an analyst deliver to each other?
• Do you need both roles or can it be merged?
• What is our common language?

The ‘HOW’ of business analysis is probably even more important than the ‘WHAT’. While the ‘WHAT’ focuses on models, methods, techniques, and deliverables, the ‘HOW’ determines how much impact you can really have.

In this session, we explore the crucial mindset and soft skills required to connect with customers, end-users, stakeholders, partners, and technical people.

Because the quality of your intervention depends on the level of consciousness with which you connect with your environment.

In agile frameworks like Scrum, XP and SAFe, the role of a business analyst is not present. That does not however mean that the work of a business analyst is not executed. On the contrary, in a truly agile environment, business analysis will be one of the key components. In most models and frameworks there is a pattern of three layers similar to the three levels of business analysis, as presented at last year’s conference by Lynda Girvan.

It is possible to plot those BA roles (enterprise, program and team) on those models and frameworks. From this perspective we can see business analysis tasks are performed at all levels of a company. At the same time everyone wants to add value and will perform some sort of business analysis tasks, to make sure that what s/he does adds value. That is why I say that everyone is a business analyst.

3 give-aways

• In agile you are responsible for adding value and challenging the work to be done, using BA-techniques, which means that everyone is more or less a business analyst. The same analogy applies to architects and project managers (although the job titles may suggest different).
• Business analysts are essential in an agile organisation.
• Most models and frameworks consist of three layers on which each level of business analysis should be performed.

In today’s world of constant change and disruption, BAs are under more pressure to facilitate solution discovery and drive business value. All too often, we are time poor, multi-tasking and dealing with difficult stakeholders, leading to poor performance and stress. Our minds can be overwhelmed by constant context-switching, which can be exhausting. Mindfulness can help build resilience, manage stress, and increase focus as well as enable clearer thinking.

In the breaks, join Kathy Berkidge for some brief mindfulness sessions to learn about mindfulness and try some different practices. You will leave feeling relaxed and refreshed ready for the rest of your day.

• Morning Coffee Break
  Openness — This exercise will help keep your mind open and alert
• Lunch Break
  Awareness — This will be a longer exercise to practice mindful awareness and presence
• Afternoon Break
  Refresh — This exercise will help you refocus and re-energise

The 5 perspectives covered in the BABOK® Guide are: Agile, Business Intelligence, Information Technology, Business Architecture, and Business Process Management. When thinking of modern organizational design to cope with dynamic markets, complex problems and ever changing needs of customers and employees (-to-be), we often think of these perspectives as well-needed disciplines. But how do we really integrate Business Analysts in cross-functional, agile, self-organizing teams instead of just creating shared-services or assigning more tasks to interdisciplinary teams?

• 1) In this talk we are going to take a look at the self-organization-"formula", which gives teams and companies an impression, where in their own reality new work-methods really need to be considered.
• 2) In a second step we will look at different forms of integrating Business Analysts in new work team structures (e.g. guilds, CoP, shared responsibility, team-member).
• 3) In the end every participant has the chance to answer his/her BA-tetralemma individually.

More than any technology before, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other data-driven solutions are stirring the ethical debate today. But while the raised concerns are often valid, there is a lack of hands-on tools that allow you to avoid ethical missteps. How can you take into account possible prejudices and structural inequalities before, during and after the development of an AI system? 

In order to help you do this, the Knowledge Centre Data & Society has developed the ‘AI Blindspots’ card set to uncover potential AI blindspots by reflecting on decisions and actions in the planning, development and deployment phase of the AI system.

In this workshop, you will be introduced to the tool and be given a hands-on experience on how you can make this tool part of your work. Since the tool is still a prototype, we are also interested in your view on how it can be improved further.

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The amount of data coming our way is growing exponentially. Visualization is one of the most effective ways to keep this tsunami of information under control.

But it is not easy: good visualization requires a combination of analytical skills with a creative mindset. It combines data analysis with user experience, storytelling and design. A good chart shows the data, but a great chart also tells the story behind the data.

In this talk, we will highlight some useful strategies and inspiring examples to start turning your complex data into powerful visual stories.

• Do you believe you behave ethically at work?
• Have you even thought about it?

The world we live in has moved from a physical realm to one where we now live partly digitally. It is growing organically, with every bright idea leading to a thousand new opportunities. But who decides what is the right thing to do in this new world? Well, we do! The Business Analysts and the teams that create it.

So far the results have been patchy. There are some great forces for good and some dangerous abuses of new technologies.

This session will discuss

• What does it mean to be ethical in the digital world?
• What are the challenges facing IT professionals?
• What can we do as BA’s to ensure customers trust the technologies of the future?

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 decisions 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.

The idea of Communities of Practice (CoP) having existed for last 25 years. Members mutually discovering which insights from the past are relevant in the present and finding ways to share their tacit knowledge represents the basis of each Community.

So, how can the Community go beyond networking and sharing, being at the same time surrounded by complexity, dependencies, intensive collaborating and agile way of working. How can you manage to become the next 3.0 Community of Practice?

This session will guide you on:

• How CoP can go cross-functional and cross-organizational?
• How agile transformation can influence CoP focus points?
• What does it take to develop your customized toolkit with CoP as lead?

A talk on customer experience and business processes. Companies are becoming more customer-centric -which is great- and are transforming their customer experience with customer journeys, personas and other things.

Something they often forget to consider are the processes necessary to deliver this great experience. Ever heard of service design? Find out how to fix this during this talk!

What we will address during this talk:

• A case on customer experience: a trip to Norway
• Characteristics of a great service
• How to build this?

Sport Flanders and Tomorrowlab have been working together for several years now to explore the future of Sport and to build the business strategy from there. Insights in trends and future customer behavior and a solid understanding of the disruptive technologies that lies ahead is crucial to stay on the map tomorrow.

Since last year, they have strengthened their cooperation with a new pillar: the digital transformation as a crucial next step.

In this talk:

• Future Foresight and Scenario Planning, necessary tools for defining a future proof diigital ambition.
• Working in 3 horizons following a proven path for digital transformation.
• Building future proof digital transformation capabilities from within the organization.

What Business Analysis tools and techniques you know of, use and find helpful. In a group you could share your knowledge for a specific technique, or as a group you could find out more for the tool and technique new to you. Then you could decide which tools and techniques are worth to be learned, practiced and taken in your toolkit.

You will use the BCS book “Business Analysis Techniques: 99 Essential Tools for Success”, by James Cadle, Debra Paul and Paul Turner.

You will widen your BA horizon and could bring the workshop at home in your organisation for your own Tools and Techniques Triage.

The “Tools and Techniques Triage” workshop was delivered first at Business Analysis Manager Forum November 2018 in London by representatives of Raytheon, that used the approach to understand the skills they have in their newly established BA team and to decide on path forward. See http://www.bamanagerforum.org/events/

It then has been used in Bulgarian IIBA Chapter in their initiative Business Analysis Practitioner Forum, where Milena has been the workshop facilitator and has helped the teams with unknown tools and techniques.

In recent years when reacting to a request for tender our approach has been to respond with a complete proposal as quickly as possible.

We have, however, encountered numerous problems with this approach e.g. too much preliminary analysis, estimations based on limited information, not enough time for involvement from developers, …

To address these shortcomings we conducted an internal review even going so far as to question our roles as analysts within the process. We are now convinced that we have a vastly improved approach.

During the talk we will present this new approach and the journey that led us there and also reveal the resulting changes in our roles as analysts.

Key messages

• We developed an improved procedure for engaging with internal and external projects (from the initial idea, to estimation, all the way through to project-kickoff).
• We will share the journey that led us to this new approach.
• We will present all this using real world examples.

Data is just raw numbers. To turn your data into insights and actions, and have those actions generate business impact, you need to go beyond the raw data and think about models, patterns, decision making and ethics.

We are happy to announce that several experts will participate in our live panel discussion on data and decisions on April 2nd:

• Lori Silverman on the role of the business analyst in supporting and facilitating collaborative data-informed decision-making
• Alec Sharp on the importance of good data modelling for business analysts
• Sacha Dubrulle on what business analysts need to know about the role of AI, machine learning, analytics and data science
• Liz Calder on ethics and trust in data-driven decision making

Our experts will present their insights, discuss how business analysts are involved, and answer your data-related questions.

We are looking forward to virtually meet you in this live and lively panel discussion.

We've all been working remotely and doing conference calls every now and then. But now, with the coronavirus, virtual working has suddenly become the norm.

In this context of long term remote collaboration, how do you ensure efficient communications? And what does this mean for BA work? When you can't quickly drop by someone's office, and when you can't participate in ad hoc conversations, how do you quickly discover misunderstandings and misalignments? How about requirements gathering? While it's easy enough to have a one to one interview remotely, what about a real workshop? How do you trigger engagement and creative collaboration online? So many questions!

We're thrilled to have Dr Penny Pullan, who has been working in and with virtual teams for many years now, share her experience and suggestions and provide us with answers to your questions.

Have you ever wondered where requirements come from? What makes a requirement "required"? Such a strong word, isn't it? Required. If we do not implement it, everything will fail. Right?

When you ask someone "their" requirements, how certain are you that this person is giving you the "right requirements"? Does it really solve a problem in the right way? Is the problem even worth solving? How much are you willing to bet on it? Your pension? Your house? Your car? Tomorrow's lunch?

In this talk I would like to show you the paradigm shift from "requirement" to "hypothesis". What does this shift mean? What is a hypothesis? How to practically organise your work around "hypothesis" and start building better (software) products?

Key Messages

• The classical "requirements" gathering question (IT to Business): "What do you need?" does not work anymore.
• "Requirements" are in the Eye of the Beholder, it is a matter of personal opinion.
• "Requirements" are therefore a 'belief', better to call them "Hypotheses".
• And you better validate these hypotheses before continuing, to make sure that what you are thinking is actually "Required"
• So, before building software that scales, performs well and has many users around the globe, do something else first.

Most Agile practitioners know why we do retrospectives. But do they know why we use post-it’s? Most people don’t.

This is one example of a hidden layer: the deeper meaning of Agile techniques. Whenever you consider using or dropping an Agile technique, you’re better sure you know all the consequences, including these hidden layers.

In this interactive and fun session, you will discover the most important hidden layers yourselves. We will play an Agile game or two, and oh, there will be some (team) competition and a price to win!

How valuable and attractive are new skills like "Business Analysis"?

Job advertisements often ask for very special roles such as "Online Product Manager (m/f/d)" or "Business Developer (m/f/x)". The fact that these roles often have large overlaps in their skill requirements is not always clear to HR managers or interested parties. Thus, suitable employees are not found or employees are not aware of suitable vacancies. Rainer Wendt uses a business analysis skills catalogue to show how versatile these skills can be in a company and how many roles can be successfully filled with them. A rethink of skill orientation in recruiting can open up new perspectives for both recruiters and applicants.

Imagine you’ve been looking forward to a dinner with friends. Great food, great company. The food turns up and its disappointing. Clearly the chef and team have great skills but the ingredients were lacking. Not a happy customer. This could be a problem with software delivery too – the customer is eagerly awaiting greatness yet what turns up does not meet expectations. If the ingredients are poor, irrespective of how good the team is, the result could be disappointing. Here we delve deeper into some of the secrets of great analysis and how to pick the right ingredients.

Join Sam Moody in her workshop, where she will unveil the “missing framework”. FEATUR is a powerful and engaging Agile business analysis framework which challenges the status quo and helps to define a best practice that we can all benefit from. Its concepts “bolt” neatly to existing frameworks such as Scrum, SAFe, LeSS and is designed to not just focus on the practices but the mindset too. FEATUR incorporates Design Thinking, Design Sprint, Lean Startup approaches as well as some additional ingredients based upon over 20 years of Business Analysis experience.

Sam will cover practical business analysis techniques leading to the following outcomes:

• Advanced knowledge of business analysis techniques within an Agile environment.
• Build better product roadmaps.
• Collaborative approaches to business analysis.

Imagine you’ve been looking forward to a dinner with friends. Great food, great company. The food turns up and its disappointing. Clearly the chef and team have great skills but the ingredients were lacking. Not a happy customer. This could be a problem with software delivery too – the customer is eagerly awaiting greatness yet what turns up does not meet expectations. If the ingredients are poor, irrespective of how good the team is, the result could be disappointing. Here we delve deeper into some of the secrets of great analysis and how to pick the right ingredients.

Join Sam Moody in her workshop, where she will unveil the “missing framework”. FEATUR is a powerful and engaging Agile business analysis framework which challenges the status quo and helps to define a best practice that we can all benefit from. Its concepts “bolt” neatly to existing frameworks such as Scrum, SAFe, LeSS and is designed to not just focus on the practices but the mindset too. FEATUR incorporates Design Thinking, Design Sprint, Lean Startup approaches as well as some additional ingredients based upon over 20 years of Business Analysis experience.

Sam will cover practical business analysis techniques leading to the following outcomes:

• Advanced knowledge of business analysis techniques within an Agile environment.
• Build better product roadmaps.
• Collaborative approaches to business analysis.

Business analysts are often celebrated for their analytical skills. Improving processes, implementing new software, and so on. However, I argue that analysts should be more like designers.

Analysts should be more involved in crafting solutions instead of streamlining processes. Talking with people wo are experiencing the problem at hand, iterating possible solutions and not being shy to go back to the drawing board: those are key skills for a business analyst 2.0. At the center of our team at KBC, we think as designers to handle problems. This is my story of thinking like a designer, doing design thinking and how to infect a large organisation with this mindset.

In this brief talk:

• Let's look at what design thinking is and what it can do,
• How design thinking acts a virus, infecting everyone involved,
• And, most importantly - how you can initiate this approach in a massive organisation.

It's going to be a funny, very honest and practical session.

Most organisations these days are applying agile methods and principles to some extent. They usually cherry-pick from frameworks and approaches like Scrum, Kanban, SAFe and LeSS, resulting in a waterfall/agile hybrid way of working.

Creating your own mixture is probably the only way to success, but where to start? How do you prevent leaving out essential parts?

In this interview, experienced Agile Coach/Trainer Stef Cuisinier will share tips from almost 30 years in the field as a developer, analyst, IT and IS manager and agile consultant.

Some topics that will be discussed in this interview:

• What's the relevance of big frameworks and how can you best apply them?
• Is agile a bottom-up or a top-down challenge? How do you bring "the other side" on board?
• Is there a place for agile beyond IT?
• How do organisational culture and structure influence the success of our projects and products, and what is the BA's role in this?

In a business environment where constant disruption is the new black, organizations are evolving in adopting AI-ML, Voice, Robotics, etc in product development. It's very important for a Business Analyst to look beyond and be a visionary.

With our talk, we would like to emphasize on seismic shift for BA’s role in designing products that are inclusive, adaptable and can overcome the unconscious biases in building products for everyone. Some of our insights include:

Shifting focus from product functionality to capabilities, designing for privacy and user safety.

Understanding behavioral patterns and body language to have breakthrough tough client management and build healthy relationships, the key to a successful partnership for a BA.

The key outcomes of this talk are:

• To sensitize the audience on approach and mindset shift to be a next-gen BA.
• To achieve diversity and inclusiveness in product development by exploring different ways of understanding projects, in more
  • P-perceivable,
  • O-operable,
  • U-understandable, and
  • R-robust ways.
• To give you the confidence to navigate around pitfalls and build responsiveness and resilience into an organization.

Data science is still a bit of "tech magic" these days. But data wiz kids alone cannot answer every data question in the blink of an eye. To help turn data into decisions, they need the right tools, the ability to collaborate with other people in the organisation, access to business knowledge, …

In this interview, we'll take away some of the magic and lift the curtain on what's needed to become a data-driven organisation.

Some topics that will be discussed in this interview:

• What is data science today, and what will it become tomorrow?
• What are the data scientist's challenges, and how can business analysts help overcome them?
• What is "DataOps" and why do we need it?

According to PMI’s Pulse of the ProfessionTM the percentage of projects with high complexity is on the rise—from 35% in 2013 to 41% in 2018. Managing multiple stakeholders is one of the defining characteristic of complexity in projects.

Identifying, understanding and managing internal and external stakeholders in a project or program can be enormously challenging even for the most experienced project manager.

In this workshop you will have the opportunity to learn and practice stakeholders management in a fun and engaging way using LEGO^® SERIOUS PLAY^® Methodology. Through hands-on and minds-on dialogic activities, you will be able to create and analyze complex stakeholder relationships using custom build LEGO^® models.

Stakeholder management is a serious game! Learn how to do it effeciently using LEGO^® SERIOUS PLAY^®

Key Takeaways

• Identification of all relevant stakeholder groups in a project or program (internal and external)
• Analysis the nature of each stakeholder on several dimensions (e.g. power, interest, attitude, other attributes etc.)
• Building and analyzing relationship between stakeholders (e.g. proximity and dependencies to other stakeholders, etc.)
• Analysis of current stakeholder relationship situation (e.g. synergies and challenges)
• Identification of opportunities and strategies for stakeholder relationships improvement

At a certain point, you might have met designers that add the "design" to your thinking. Collaboration between business-experts and "creatives" is crucial for the multi-disciplinary design thinking process, but... it also creates tension. There's a feeling of worlds colliding, a clash of perspectives, we versus them. But when does somebody become or stop being a creative person? Let's analyse the anatomy of a designer and uncover some hidden creative potential.

Key messages:

• Understand designers better and possibly make work together easier.
• Gain insight into how you can tap into the creative potential within yourself and your team.
• Build an understanding of how to install a "design" culture through personal development.