Why your BA Toolkit should include Decision Modeling

Momentum continues to build for the business rule revolution, with more and more organizations adopting the practice of Decision Management to tame unruly business rules and gain business agility. As a business analyst, there has never been a better time to learn the technique of decision modeling to boost your organization and your career.

Built with easy to use, highly visual tools, decision models are your requirements. Decision Management helps close the gap between the Business and IT.

Join our panel of experienced Business Analyst practitioners from several organizations for a discussion among peers on where and how Decision Management provides value, like enabling BA’s to manage business rules more effectively and even develop new products with no background in coding. We’ll invite questions from the audience as well to create a more engaging experience.

Featured Speaker(s):
Justin Patterson, Sales Engineer
Sapiens Decision
Justin’s role is Sales Engineer, North America, for Sapiens Decision. Justin brings over 15 years of mortgage experience in mortgage lending and 9 years’ experience decision modeling. He provides an industry perspective as well as a client’s perspective.

Building Business Capability

Building Business Capability is the only conference that enhances your ability to advance People, Product, Data, and Knowledge, to build your core leadership skills, to create a customer centric organization, and to deliver digital transformation.

Essential Requirements Practices

Many big books on software requirements and business analysis recommend dozens and dozens of practices. They’re all useful in appropriate situations, but it’s daunting to try to remember—let alone implement—the whole set consistently. However, every project should perform 20 core requirements activities. These lay a solid foundation for success and help teams efficiently and effectively elicit, analyze, specify, validate, and manage their requirements. These practices are valuable for both traditional and agile projects, regardless of the kind of product you’re building.

This presentation identifies those 20 core practices and drills down into several of them. They can help project and product teams understand the business problem, engage the right participants, articulate effective solutions, communicate information among stakeholders, implement the right functionality in the right sequence, and adapt to change. Do you have to perform all 20 of these on your project? Maybe not, but you’ll feel less pain and get better results if you do.

Technical Skills Every Business Analyst Should Master or At Least Understand

I have been one to say over the years that I would hire a person with excellent communication skills, analytical skills and facilitation skills even without business area knowledge and / or technical skills because the latter knowledge and skills can be taught to someone who possesses the former set of skills. And, let’s face it, technical skills keep changing faster than a normal human can keep up. Only a few years ago you would find it hard to see a position announcement in the Business Analyst world that included ‘machine language skills’, but today it is not unusual.

But what are the companies who ask for business analyst candidates with “machine language skills” or “blockchain background” or ‘big data knowledge” really looking for? Why are they asking for technical skills that are not really part of the business analyst’s venue?

This webinar presents the technical skills in demand today and what the organizations asking for those skills actually expect out of the business analyst. The webinar also discusses the sneaky recruiting tactics many organizations use when hiring, especially in a seller’s recruitment market.

Traceability in Agile Processes

There are quite a few best practices and recommended techniques that are touted around the traditional project management community, and even taken for granted, that are completely missing in the agile world. Even roles disappear – the business analyst and project manager have been excommunicated in Scrum and other agile approaches, for example. There is no WBS, precedence network, Gantt chart, risk analysis and risk management, status reports and lessons learned submissions. Or are there?

Is it possible that practices that have withstood the test of time for project management or product development have no value anymore? Or does agile still use them, perhaps just in a different way?

One of these practices, primarily employed to reduce risk of building the wrong product is traceability. This webinar discusses the “lost project management practices” in agile and whether they are really lost, using traceability as an example.

Starting Over - To Business Analysis and Beyond

According to statistics, if you are between 18 and 24 today you will change careers an average of 5.7 times during your working lifetime. So, the question becomes what should an analyst do to prepare themselves for a career change so that they can take advantage of the many opportunities that are out there. How can you apply your business analytical acumen, as well as your business analysis techniques and practices, to move to a different industry, or even a different role in the organization?

This webinar introduces you to a number of steps you can take to transition into a business analyst career or, when it becomes necessary or desirable, to transition into an entirely new career. It also will present some tips for how to acquire that new career in the first place.

Critical Success Factors for Business Analysts

One of the ongoing questions in the business analyst profession from those who manage business analysts to the business analysts themselves is “how do we measure business analysts?”

Since much of the success that business analysts achieve is based, in good part, on the work that others perform (as are the business analyst failures) it is difficult to carve out specific metrics that the business analyst (or the business analyst’s manager) can point to which support their claim to success or not. But there may be some critical success factors in the profession that determine whether a business analyst is performing successfully, with excellence, or just adequately. Or worse...

This webinar discusses the problems of business analyst metrics and how business analysts are typically measured in terms of their overall success.