BA & Beyond 2018

‘Holism’ originates from the Greek word ‘holos’ (= ‘all’, ‘whole’, ‘entire’), and is the concept that systems (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, etc.) and their properties should be viewed as wholes, not just as a collection of its parts.

Business Analysts are very often absorbed by their work on solutions, customer journeys, business process improvements, and so on … whereas each of those initiatives are very likely to have an impact on the whole organisation.

As such, the Holistic Business Analyst looks at an organisation as a whole and not only as a collection of employees, business domain(s), customers, processes, systems, change initiatives, etc. …

The speaker will introduce you to the world of the Holistic Business Analyst and what it takes to become one. He will show you the different levels on which the Holistic BA can contribute, the different levels of requirements, the different types of scope, the different types of stakeholders, ... and how all of these are connected.

The presentation will:

• invite you to see the BA profession beyond the tasks and techniques
• invite you to see your organisation as a whole as well as a collection of its parts
• introduce you to concepts & techniques essential to Holistic Business Analysis

Do companies overlook the long-term added value of having BA’s present in the strategical and tactical levels? The BA role should also be about exploring and recommending solutions, rather than only executing detailed analysis on (sometimes) sub-optimal decisions. In the Belgium market, people with the title ‘BA’ generally work as requirements engineers or functional analysts. How can we help to position the BA where they are able to generate better value?

By asking ‘Why’ on strategical, tactical and operational level, BA’s are able to focus on delivering the real value sought by stakeholders. When linking the ‘why’ across those levels, we can leverage affective organizational commitment and generate better outcome in a more efficient and durable way.

Learn how asking why can be a catalyst for demonstrating to organizations why BA’s are of value during the decision-making process.

In a new world where information is data and data is everywhere, it makes sense to analyse behavior from a data-stream point of view. How can old but proven methodologies help us today as a Business Analysts to explore complex system behavior?

System Dynamics applied to modern architectures can open up a whole new set of insights that are crucial for building High Quality Business Requirements.

Learn the concepts and experience the value of this approach by real business case applied at Bridgestone Belgium.

Business stakeholders want projects to deliver fast. They often come to the project team with a clear view of the solution, expecting a quick start and not leaving much room or time for challenging and proposing alternatives. However, this mindset carries with it an important risk: blindly building the proposed solution does not guarantee business value.

People in a BA role (like business analysts and architects, but also product managers, process owners, customer journey managers and so on) often have the analytical skills and corporate overview to put the proposed solution in perspective and identify potential pitfalls hindering the proposed solution from delivering value. More importantly, they usually are well positioned in the organisation to connect the dots between the stakeholder’s goals and the solution implementation.

In this session, Filip will present three key aspects of value creation by this BA role, effectively helping the BA make the shift from solution implementation to lean strategy execution:

• Pin down goals: When will the project be considered successful?
• Expose enablers: How will the proposed solution help achieve these goals?
• Identify and validate hypotheses: Are we really sure the proposed solution is the right one?

This case study documents the early stages of an organisation going Agile, and how that impacts the BA community.

Euroclear still uses a waterfall approach for 80% of its application development, but is in the midst of a transformation towards Agile. It is a clear case of 'steering the oil tanker in a new direction’, facing all the complexities that come with a decentralised, partnered, off-shored model, in a heavily regulated industry (Financial Market Infrastructure).

We’ll share the many lessons we’ve learned along the way, focusing on how we fitted BAs into Scrum, and an initiative that aims to reduce the project initiation lead time by 50%. Expect a very concrete and actionable list of challenges, potential pitfalls, tips & tricks, and how we at Euroclear deal with them. We’ll cover process, knowledge management, change management, document reviews, tooling, etc.

A lot of fuzz around GDPR but little practicalities. Therefore, you will learn:

• What is the purpose of Privacy by design
• What is the difference with Privacy by Default
• Get a head start at your next analyses!

A common trend in the Agile community is to question and object the so-called “unagile” approaches, usually without a complete understanding of them. Even though Agile systems have great potentials, this problem limits their capabilities by disconnecting them from the past.

In this session, we’ll review multiple examples of continuity in music, visual arts, science, and philosophy, and contrast them with project management, which is one of the few domains that has broken this norm. We’ll talk about the downsides of this trends, and about what practitioners like you can do to minimize this shortcoming, and become a real master of your domain.

Digitization is hot in the world of mortgage loans: customers expect omni-channel banking services seamlessly integrated with their journey to acquire real estate / property. In this light, AXA Bank is in full transformation in order to offer their customers the best possible customer experience.

The challenges that arise are huge because of the number of departments that must agree on the requirements, the number of software applications and vendors that are impacted and the complexity that omni-channel introduces.

To cope with these challenges, the business analysts apply a business analysis framework that allows to elaborate on the various aspects of AXA Bank’s loan origination capability and the value it delivers to the customers on a just enough, just in time basis. Central in the business analysis framework are powerful visuals that keep all stakeholders on the same page to keep the pace in the requirements process.

In this session, the audience will:

• learn about a holistic business analysis framework that they can apply instantly in their current project context
• learn how AXA Bank combines requirements stemming from customer-centric analysis sessions and ‘traditional’ requirements into one structured backlog
• be inspired by the business value that simple, clear visuals can provide

This interactive session provides an overview of various methodologies and discusses how each of them can be applied to support design and delivery of digital products and services. The session will explore four stages of Double Diamond and core activities and artefacts applicable for each of the stages. It will also cover the benefits of using Lean for rapid prototyping and how the backlog can be matured as the prototype evolves to feed into the agile delivery.

When you engage with clients and stakeholders you hear a lot of interesting ideas and problems worth fixing.

When you want to fix a lot of problems with one project/software you’ll probably end up with nothing.

When you want to create value, keeping focus is essential for success.

• Scope selection is a messy but important task. Make a very clear selection of what is in and even more important what is out of scope.
• Keep good relations with clients and stakeholders that have out of scope problems and ideas
• Fall in love with the problem and share this enthusiasm.

Business analyses is about saying no to most ideas and problems while keeping everyone engaged.

We will illustrate this case with real examples.

User experience interviews are a great way to extract qualitative feedback from users for user experience and usability understanding. Information can be extracted from users about a certain application, product, service or even an idea. User experience interviews may therefore uncover possible issues and can give the interviewer valuable user arguments, problems and questions.

Visualisation and visual facilitation is a (new) method to make content and process visible in realtime. Be it in presentations, workshops, coaching sessions, trainings and meetings – whenever people engage in dialogue, are working together and want to learn from each other in an impactful way. Bikablo is the brand that opens the door to the world of visual thinking and dialogue.

If you are (still) convinced that you are not at all talented and still would like to learn how to visualize, you have little experience with visualization so far and are looking for an easy way to improve your flip charts and make them more clear, attractive, and lively or you want to take your first steps into the world of visual facilitation and storytelling this session is definitely something you will never forget.

How do we know that a development team understands something in the same way the business does?
How can we see and model a system as it really is, with all its complexity and ambiguities?
How do we know that we are working to solve the right problem ?

EventStorming, especially the Big Picture format, is about discovering, learning and sharing this common understanding, complexity and problems.

EventStorming takes its roots in Domain Driven Design.
It is about learning the domain, as fast as possible, together with the business.
Breaking the silos that exists in some companies between business and IT.
So that we, from IT , can describe the model and the system in business terms instead of technical ones.
Using only a Big Wall, Pens and Stickies !

This session will introduce the ideas & insights from running an EventStorming workshop:

• Modelling a whole Business Line with Domain Events
• Deliberate learning
• A Tool for different tribes : Lean, Ux, Agile, Software developper, Business

On projects, it often feels like our stakeholders expect us to be magicians. They expect us to carry out high quality work with far less time and resources than we really need. We have a broad and varied toolkit, but sometimes it feels like we need some real magic to make our projects work.

But what if we really could use magic? Or at least the techniques from a magician's toolbox?

In this interactive session Adrian Reed explains how a chance meeting with a Magician challenged the way he thought about Business Analysis. You'll hear:

• A range of techniques from magic, conjuring and mentalism that have parallel applications in the world of business analysis
• The importance of audience management, and what this means for BAs
• How to avoid "magic for magicians" (or "analysis for analysts")

You'll take away practical tips and techniques, whilst seeing some magic tricks too.

In Agile there is no BA role, only PO, SM and Development Team member. The analysis work remains, where should the BA do his magic? Or is it a team effort?

Should the BA be placed next to the PO, where the BA has a clear task to support the PO in preparing the User Stories, and prioritising the Backlog. Or be the PO, due to our experience with stakeholder management, requirements gathering etc. Another option is the BA as an expert in a tribe to support various teams.

Or should the BA become part of the Development Team. During every sprint analysis are necessary and with the knowledge of a BA User Stories they can be transferred to test cases. And when working within the Development Team there is room to support the PO with preparing the next User Stories and prioritising the Backlog.

So, the BA can be on both sides but will ad most value within the Development Team

• Analysis during sprints
• Be a T-shaped BA and supporting the Team effort with the broad knowledge
• Still able to support the PO in preparing the next User Stories

In this session, we will share how we do architecture within SNCB B-IT. We will share deliverables having value to support decision making and the model to support automatic delivery of pre-defined reports. We will also share how we are organized in terms of roles and organisation.

Main messages:

• Architecture roles & organisation
• Example of value propositions for SNCB
• Activities to embed to update an architecture continuum
• Overview of the SNCB architecture continuum

The business analyst is often referred to as a "miracle worker". Building bridges between business and IT, supported by various tools, methodologies and competences, he/she is often critical for the success of a project.

What if, thanks to the trend of low code development, the stakes have just increased and the impact of the business analyst can increase to unseen heights? Gartner, Forrester and real life use cases have shown that a business analyst is the ideal "low code" citizen developer, as they obtain the ideal skills to take up this responsibility.

In this session I want to:

• Explain the context of low code development and the citizen developer, and why it's an evolution that is here to stay.
• Elaborate on the countless amount of benefits that can be achieved through it, and why the business analyst will play a key role.
• Inspire business analysts to give low code development a try.

Domain Driven Design is not yet another methodology prescribing what to do when in the software development cycle. Domain Driven Design is a mindset, a philosophy on how to approach everything surrounding software development. Through Ubiquitous Language, the whole team (developers, engineers, clients and others) can collaborate in the same way. This language also determines how the software is built and is different from one bounded context to another. Therefore, Domain Driven Design facilitates verifying whether your team is building the right thing and speeds up the process of noticing mistakes. A positive side effect includes that great software will be produced.

Nowadays everybody is talking about strategic planning and analysis slicing methods to deliver high-valued products in Agile organizations. In this learning journey poster you will find out what is behind it all, from team level all the way up to senior management and back. Agile planning and analysis means looking for ways to understand your customer, thinking in options, validating assumptions, looking for value, taking commitments, prioritisation and continuously striving to better meet your customers expectations. This visual will guide you through the flow from ‘suspected need to fulfilled need’ and it explains the mindset behind it.

This Learning Journey Poster is the essential tool to help any trainer/facilitator/practioner to have a quick at-a-glance reference at their fingertips. Whether you simply want to learn more about the methods or process or use it as a vital part in your workshops , this poster is presented in a user-friendly style with simple explanations and intuitive illustrations making it easy to follow and to learn from.