BA & Beyond

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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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.

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.

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 Pardeep Dhanda, the Head of Agile Practices at QA and founder of FEATUR Labs, where he 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.

Pardeep 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.

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!

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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