Pre-Conference Workshops - Monday - 27 September 2010

09:30 - 13:00
Supplier Management

James Cadle AssistKD To Speaker's Bio

Morning Workshop Outline

With the growth of outsourcing in recent years, more and more professionals -not just procurement managers - find themselves in the position of managing suppliers. In the IS field, both systems development and the support of existing systems have often been outsourced, with business analysts providing the bridge between the business users and the suppliers who, as well as being outsourced are often offshore as well, sometimes on the other side of the globe.

In this interactive tutorial, James Cadle will consider the major issues to be addressed in this area. He will show that there is much more to effective supplier management than just putting the right contract in place and then managing rigidly to it. Effective supplier management starts with the initial selection of the supplier, proceeds through setting up the contract and, most importantly, involves establishing and developing the working relationships. It is these that ultimately determine the success - or failure - of the outsourcing partnership.

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09:30 - 13:00
How Business Analysts Can Be Innovative When Discovering Requirements

	James Robertson The Atlantic Systems Guild To Speaker's Bio
	Suzanne Robertson The Atlantic Systems Guild To Speaker's Bio

Morning Workshop Outline

Gathering requirements is often seen as a "stenographer's task" where the BA passively records the stakeholders' needs. This relies on stakeholders always knowing what they need, but experience tells us that people usually ask for incremental improvements on what they have at the moment. Useful products do not come about from stakeholders' requests, but from innovation. The mobile phone, text messaging, the World Wide Web and countless others are innovations.

In this tutorial we explain how to use innovation techniques to bring about more useful, usable and competitive systems, services and products. We provide examples and illustrations from our own industry experience. We show participants how to make innovation a regular part of their business analysis process.

• Innovation is fresh thinking about systems and business processes
• Innovation techniques help BAs to be innovative
• Innovation is not an additional task, it is part of what you d

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09:30 - 13:00
Agile Requirements: Collaborating to Define and Confirm Needs

Ellen Gottesdiener EBG Consulting To Speaker's Bio

Morning Workshop Outline

Requirements are the basis for delivering business value on agile projects. In this interactive workshop, requirements expert and agile coach Ellen Gottesdiener teaches you foundational skills and knowledge for defining and confirming customer needs so you can successfully build your product using agile requirements practices.
Learning Objectives:

• Identify the key practices of agile requirements
• Define concise user stories that form the basis for development and delivery
• Describe unambiguous acceptance criteria ("doneness") for stories
• Understand how user stories need to fit within the context of the overall product vision and roadmap

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14:00 - 17:30
Counting Bricks not Clouds: How Business Analysis Provides the Foundation for Project Management

	Suzanne Robertson The Atlantic Systems Guild To Speaker's Bio
	Stephen Mellor To Speaker's Bio

Afternoon Workshop Outline

This half day workshop is about how the work done by business analysts can provide valuable input for managing projects and for making strategic decisions across projects. If the business analysis deliverables are in a consistent and understandable language then those deliverables can be used as input to estimating, monitoring, prioritisation, response to change, task assignment, strategic project planning - to name just a few possibilities.

The workshop will cover topics like:

• The future of business analysis as a wide communications tool
• Building your requirements knowledge model
• Establishing stakeholder ownership of knowledge
• Making estimates from requirements knowledge
• Requirements as units of decision making
• The future of requirements reuse

The format of the workshop will be a mixture of discussion and practical exercises.

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14:00 - 17:30
Selecting the Top 11 Business Analysis Techniques

	Debbie Paul AssistKD To Speaker's Bio
	Paul Turner AssistKD To Speaker's Bio

Afternoon Workshop Outline

Organisations are keen to adopt methods and approaches that are Agile or Lean, but often fail to recognise that the Business Analysis team is the key resource that will help them achieve business agility and success. The adoption of specific methods and approaches, even those where the goal is flexibility, still requires the use of best practice techniques, many of which are common across a range of standards. An effective use of the business analysts could yield even more benefit and ensure that agility focuses on meeting business needs not on delivering software solutions.

In this interactive tutorial, Debbie Paul and Paul Turner will look at some of the top 11 techniques for business analysts selected from those described in their new book, Business Analysis Techniques (publ. BCS, 2010). They will consider how these particular techniques can help business analysts gather, document, analyse and exploit information more effectively for real business benefit.

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14:00 - 17:30
Agile and the Business Analyst

Chris Matts Project Manager UBS To Speaker's Bio

Afternoon Workshop Outline

Learn how Traditional Business Analysis Techniques can be used to enhance an Agile Development using Test Driven Development. Traditional analysis techniques can be tweaked to avoid analysis paralysis and to "flow" requirements into an Agile development process. Understand how "User Stories" can be used by a business analyst.

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