IIBA just released their 2021 Global State of Business Analysis Report. Over 50 pages of finding on all aspects of the role and the skill of Business Analysis. Keith Ellis, Chief Engagement and Growth Office for IIBA will break down the findings to the key elements and discuss what trends match up with these findings and what IIBA’s plans are to help support the evolution of the Business Analysis/Analyst profession.

This presentation is extremely valuable as you consider your career growth / evolution plans in the fast of a rapidly changing work environment. Keith is prepared to answer questions around the trends you should be thinking about and impacts of those trends.

Opening Keynote: Keith Ellis

In this environment, the ‘Business’ or the most immediate client is IT, so it is more technical than other business stakeholder groups. The BA needs to be able to create Requirements around the application they are working on, and to work with the appropriate security expert to ensure the requirements and voice of the business are well understood and built into solutions.
In this session we will cover three areas for defining Cybersecurity from a BA perspective.

1. Cybersecurity:
   
   1. The protection of computer networks and data from various of electronic and digital threats.
2. Network protection:
   
   1. Prevents attacks that deny users access to the business’s computer resources such as servers
   2. Extends to shielding the business from intrusions and use of the network for unauthorized purposes.
3. Data protection:
   
   1. Safeguarding the privacy of an organization’s data, which often contains customer information that would be harmful in the wrong hands.
   2. Business organizations apply cybersecurity by adopting and using policies, tools, and practices directed towards the prevention of cyberattacks.

The role of the business analyst in cybersecurity is primarily to ensure that the business properly adopts and employs those policies, tools, and practices.
 
Topics to be covered:

• Business Analysis Practitioner (BA) Focal Points
• Defining Cybersecurity
• Use Cases
• Strategic and Tactical Roles
• Operational Roles
• Technology Expertise

Process Expertise

Speaker: David Mantica

Experience is a powerful teacher, but it’s also slow and painful. Software practitioners can’t afford to make every mistake others have suffered. You can compress the education and bypass much of the pain by absorbing lessons from others who have already climbed the learning curves.

Based on my more than 50 years of software experience and 25 years of helping software teams succeed in nearly 150 organizations, the book Software Development Pearls presents 60 lessons you can apply to projects regardless of the application domain, technology, development lifecycle, or your role. These pragmatic principles, perspectives, and practices cover six crucial domains of project success: requirements, design, project management, culture and teamwork, quality, and process improvement.

This presentation briefly introduces 24 of the 60 lessons and drills down into six additional lessons. Collecting such pearls of software wisdom can pay off quickly for anyone striving to build high-quality software products.

Speaker: Karl Wiegers

Have you ever tried to describe a complicated functional need to both technical and business resources using simply use your stories or requirements listing? Often you receive grumbling about the difficulty of understanding the holistic picture of what is needed. There are times that a consolidated story is necessary to help both sides understand the experience expected for the user in order to meet the need. Use cases can provide this and do not have to be a massive undertaking to create. Please join us at a session where use case authoring will be demystified.
Learning Objectives

• Define a use case and how it differs from user stories
• Explain why use cases are beneficial
• Write a Use Case

Speaker: Lora McCoy

Exploring the business analysis competency model through the lens of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural principles drives home the concept that basic competencies remain constant. Techniques and application of the competencies may evolve, but the basic, driving competencies do not change. This session will focus on comparing the BA Competencies with the driving principles that Frank Lloyd Wright incorporated in his residential structures throughout his career. The Competency Model wheel provides the visual for our BA competencies. Images of Wright homes will be shared as well to provide examples that support our discussion.

Speaker: Beverly Weable

One of the wicked problems in large organizations is aligning and coordinating work across multiple teams. Tangles of interdependencies mean that a problem in one team produces undesirable 'butterfly effects' across the entire group. Techniques such as PI (Program Increment) Planning, which are based on linear time, are totally ineffective in complex environments. A dynamic coordination mechanism is needed. In this talk, John will share with you some cutting-edge Complexity theory and how he is applying it to address this challenge in one of the world's largest financial institutions.

Afternoon Keynote: John Dobbin

If you want to lead, if you want to influence others, if you want to have success on your projects, you need to be an effective communicator. VITAL Communication is a simple and powerful approach to creating communication that gets results. VITAL is an acronym that stands for five timeless communication principles:

make it Visual,
make it Interesting,
make it Time-sensitive,
make it Action-oriented,
and make it Logical

In this 45-minute workshop participants will learn to apply these concepts to their presentations and public communication.

Speaker: Tommy Re

A great Product Owner can help organizations achieve amazing outcomes for their customers.  As more organizations transform the way they work, many Business Analysts have the opportunity to provide critical support to Product Owners or move into Product Owner roles themselves.
Successful Product Ownership is about more than just backlogs and user stories.  It requires a deep understanding of how to find the right problem/solution fit and the right product/market fit.  In this session, you’ll understand the product development process and how to discover the right customer problems to solve to maximize the value delivered by your organization.

Speaker: David Saboe

Value can be interpreted many different ways.  How can we manage stakeholder expectations without determining their view of value. Value for what we do as business analysts or value of the solution we intend to implement. Can we uncover their assumptions of value and try to make them less ambiguous and even more tangible? This short presentation will hit on some key questions to ask and a few techniques to apply.

Speaker: Gina Schmidt

Business Analysis professionals who hold certifications earn notably more than non-certified professionals, according to IIBA’s Business Analysis Salary Survey Report. But the benefits of a BA certification go far beyond increased earning power. In this discussion, we’ll be discussing the following:

• Types of BA Certifications
• Financial Benefits
• Individual Benefits
• Organizational Benefits
• Positioning for the Future

Speaker: Michael White

Pat’s closing keynote will explore the forces that we're facing into and map some surprising BA “Superpowers” we need to focus on today as we learn to tread water and concurrently develop new capabilities to chart the deeper, untamed waters further ahead of us. Using the challenge as a forcing function, Pat will go through some differentiating capabilities including:

• Sensemaking
• Co-Creating and Co-Regulating
• Creating Liminal Spaces
• Value Engineering (by “doing less” vs. “doing more with less”)
• Learning Agility
• Rewilding Agility through Adaptive Leadership

 
Pat's closing keynote will challenge us into new ways of thinking and how we might apply new ways of working through thought-provoking adaptive actions; and possibly leverage what we learn to start a charting playbook; reinforcing the reality that we can't think ourselves into new ways of thinking. Instead, we must ‘act’ our way into new beliefs and behaviors.

Closing Keynote: Pat Reed