08:00 | registration; coffee & light breakfast; sponsor exhibits meeting lounge |
08:00 | ||
09:00 | welcome & intro; one minute pitches Stefan Bossuwé (IIBA Brussels Chapter) & Martin Bloemendal (IIBA Dutch Chapter) Filip Hendrickx (altershape) room D |
09:00 | ||
room change | ||||
room C (Churchilldok) | room D (Deurganckdok) | |||
a new perspective on proven approaches | strategic BA | |||
09:35 | Introducing the Holistic Business Analyst Stefan Bossuwé | Helping organizations make better decisions by putting why (back) into the BA’s perspectives Robin Smets | 09:35 | |
room change | ||||
10:20 | Old School System Dynamics in a Data Science First World Wim Debreuck | Lean Strategy Execution: the BA's Cup of Tea? Filip Hendrickx | 10:20 | |
11:00 | coffee break; sponsor exhibits meeting lounge |
11:00 | ||
agile & BA | hot topics | |||
11:30 | Going Agile: Euroclear Case Study Peter Maeseele & Meritxell Chavigné Jorba | GDPR for Business Analysts: Privacy by design starts with YOU! Nicolas Delcroix | 11:30 | |
room change | ||||
12:15 | Are you a Professional BA in the Agile Age? Nader K. Rad | Digitizing the mortgage process at AXA Bank - The BA as a conciliator Ruben Vuylsteke & Matthias Barrie | 12:15 | |
12:55 | lunch break; sponsor exhibits meeting lounge |
12:55 | ||
13:40 | poster presentations | sponsor presentations | 13:40 | |
The BA, part of the Agile development team, or an additional Product Owner?
Wouter Nieuwenburg
|
13:40
Namahn
|
|||
14:10
The Business Analysts
|
||||
Domain Driven Design - What is your domain about?
Rowin Heymans
|
|
|||
Slicing for Happiness - Learning Journey Map
Koen De Keersmaecker
|
|
|||
room change | ||||
customer thinking | facilitation skills | |||
14:45 | Service design, lean and agile for designing and delivering digital products and services Svetlana Tarnagurskaja | The art of saying no Frauke Neels & Michel Van Montfort | 14:45 | |
room change | ||||
15:30 |
|
Choose from 2 mini-workshops
Thought sketching for business analysts and beyond
Koen De Keersmaecker
EventStorming: A Collaborative Learning Tool
Yves Lorphelin & Ine Boonen
|
15:30 | |
16:10 | coffee break; sponsor exhibits meeting lounge |
16:10 | ||
16:40 |
keynote And then the Magic Happens: What BAs can Learn from the World of Magic Adrian Reed room D |
16:40 | ||
17:40 | conference close Patrick Van Renterghem (IT Works) & Filip Hendrickx (altershape) room D |
17:40 | ||
17:45 | networking drink meeting lounge |
17:45 |
‘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:
Being passionate about business analysis for many years, Stefan Bossuwé founded together with a small group of business analysis enthusiasts the IIBA® Brussels Chapter (covering Belgium and Luxembourg) in 2009, where he got appointed as Chairman.
He has followed several business analysis trainings, including the indispensable ‘Mastering the Requirements Process’ workshops (Volere), given by Suzanne and James Robertson.
Stefan became in 2012 the very first Certified Business Analysis Professional™ (CBAP®) in Belgium and Luxembourg. He has got more than 25 years of experience in various roles and a wide range of different business domains.
Stefan firmly believes in the importance of business analysis and spends much of his time in promoting the business analysis profession. Besides sharing his knowledge and experience as a speaker at various conferences and seminars throughout Europe, he also assists organisations in increasing their maturity on business analysis: coaching business analysts, introducing and deploying methodologies & best practices, and so on …
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.
Robin Smets is a Senior Consultant in the banking & insurance industry with a keen focus on Business Analysis. He worked on several international client projects in domains like fund management, finance, credits, retail banking, HR and insurance in both predictive and adaptive environments. He is also active as BA Competence Centre Leader at Contraste Europe.
Robin has a passion for productivity and effectiveness and is always looking for innovative ways to help organizations reap the advantages from correctly applying the principles of chosen methodologies. He thrives on solving complex situations and trying to depict them in the simplest way possible.
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.
Wim Debreuck is CEO of www.d-n.be, bespoke project software company that delivers custom solutions to a broad area of domains. As a 20 years experienced business analyst, Wim’s focus is on Data Science and Functional Architecture. Wim’s company implements the solution in a Cloud Native System Architecture using Oracle Cloud technology.
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:
After about 10 years in business consulting and a prior 10 years in software engineering and research, Filip Hendrickx founded altershape to help established organisations become corporate startups. To do this, he follows a structured yet pragmatic approach, by bridging BA with lean startup and innovation techniques.
Filip is also creator of vantaggio, a benefit mapping tool, co-founder of ingage, a company focusing on the people side of business agility, and co-author with Ian Richards of the upcoming book on business transformation "When change isn't strange".
Finally, as VP Events of the IIBA Brussels Chapter, Filip helps supporting the BA profession and building the BA community in Belgium.
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.
Over the past 20 years Peter Maeseele has worked as business analyst & business process engineer, UX & interaction designer, functional analyst, and usability engineer, in both the service & product design context. In recent years he has been focusing on business analysis methodology, helping BAs specifically in moving towards more Agile ways of working.
For more than a decade, Meritxell Chavigné Jorba has been working as a business and functional analyst in a financial institution. She has worked in several domains and has specialised in collateral management. She has been leading and coaching business analysts for the past years.
A lot of fuzz around GDPR but little practicalities. Therefore, you will learn:
Nicolas Delcroix has been working in Information Risk Management for over 15 years with a primary focus on linking business with IT. He started off working for the Big 4 with an large enterprise clientele, and created since then 7 different SME’s himself. Therefore, he understand as no other the possibilities and challenges of small and medium enterprises.
Since 2009, he is, from a content point of view, providing services as Data Protection Officer and investigated for before the GDPR already the practical implications of privacy on the workfloor. Hij speaks on conferences as Infosecurity and IBM and co-organized sessions of LSec. Besides this, he teaches already many years for national and international organizations and universities.
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.
Nader K. Rad is a project management author, speaker, and adviser from Management Plaza: a provider of elearning courses on project management.
Nader has 17 years of experience in IT projects, as well as process plant and construction projects. He has experienced both predictive and adaptive environments in the project, program, and portfolio levels, from small IT startups to large oil and gas companies.
He has authored more than 40 books, and designed multiple training courses on the topic. He has been the official reviewer of PRINCE2 Agile® and PRINCE2® 2017, and a contributor to the PMBOK Guide®, and P3.express.
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:
Ruben Vuylsteke is a senior digital business consultant at AE, a Belgian consultancy firm specializing in digital business and innovative technologies.
He holds a Master Degree in Commercial Engineering in Management Informatics (KU Leuven, 2013).
At AE, Ruben managed the Business Analysis and Architecture Competence Center in 2015 and 2016. Previous clients include Isabel, Eni gas & power and AXA Bank. He typically takes up the role of business analyst or architect and designs the analysis approach that best fits the specific context.
Ruben frequently writes articles on Business Analysis & Architecture on AE’s blog.
Matthias Barrie is Head of Digital at AXA Bank.
He holds Masters Degrees in Communication Sciences (Ghent University, 2008) and Marketing Management (Vlerick Management School, 2009).
He joined press agency Belga in 2009, followed by a research position at iMinds (formerly known as IBBT, the Insititute for BroadBand Technology).
In 2012 he was leading the product marketing department at goudengids.be where he was responsible for the launch of various digital platforms.
Since 2016, he has been working at AXA Bank as Head of Digital, working on a variety of innovation projects.
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.
Svetlana Tarnagurskaja has over ten years of industry experience and is currently leading the team of 35 Analysts at BJSS – the award-winning technology and business consultancy based in the UK. Throughout her career Svetlana has been involved in various change management programmes and was responsible for system development and design of large scale technology platforms and reporting solutions for financial transaction processing, regulatory and surveillance platforms as well as a number of complex technical implementations within insurance and telecom industries. Svetlana is the passionate advocate of agile and loves nothing more than being a part of a team of talented technologists delivering a great product together.
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.
Business analyses is about saying no to most ideas and problems while keeping everyone engaged.
We will illustrate this case with real examples.
Frauke Neels & Michel Van Montfort met each other in 2005 at SD Worx. They were asked as content experts to give input to development in software projects. Failures learned them being content expert is not enough. Through training and reading they dived into the world of business analysis, always combining theory with practice.
Frauke established the Expertise centre for Business analysis and became Head of Business analysis.
Michel became Corporate Business Architect and translated strategy and business problems into concrete scope and projects.
Currently they both hold a Product Management function, Frauke for Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting Belgium, and Michel for SD Worx Internal Products & Services. They still share a deep interest in business analysis and believe the BA toolset and skills forms a strong base for Product Management.
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.
Peter Gevaerts (47) has a background in communications and IT. He rolled into the web business as portal site manager at Telenet in 2004.
He specialised in usability design at KU Leuven in 2006. Ever since he is been an enthusiast practitioner of usability, information architecture and everything UX in several agencies and at ACA IT-Solutions. He was part of the teams that brought the National Lottery online and that created the first mobile banking app in Belgium.
For the past years he is been UX Researcher at BNP Paribas Fortis, bringing insights from customers to the work floor on a weekly base.
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.
Koen De keersmaecker is a visual facilitator, visual trainer and visual coach. He is founder of Bizzuals, a visual incubator that empowers people and organisations to think with the pen. His main observation is “People think they understand each other, but in reality they don’t.”
As bikablo® certified global trainer, he trains and coaches people and teams in the bikablo® visualization technique — a technique which improves learning, knowledge transfer, dialogue and collaboration.
Over the last 10 years , he ha s been working as a pragmatic “Enterprise Lean-Agile Coach”, supporting companies big and small in their improvement journeys in immer changing markets, be it adoption Agile models or thriving as a start -up.
Today his passion is exploring new techniques and methods for inspiring people and how to make their messages stick. He lives with his wife and 2 sons in Antwerp.
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:
Yves Lorphelin somehow landed into the world of software development. He currently focuses his learning on Domain Driven Design and related modelling techniques.
Building systems to solve business problems, trying not to create new ones. And always creating long term relationships with customers.
He worked in all kind of domains: banking, leasing, logistics, Healthcare, HR recruitment, … And spends his time building new systems, replacing legacy, integrating systems.
He currently leads the development of an HR system, used by government agencies in Belgium. This system focuses mainly on the screening and selection process.
During the past 10 years, Ine Boonen has been working in the domains recruitment and screening. The last 4 years she uses her experience in application projects, facilitating contacts between business & IT. She works in the team Business applications of the Department recruitment and training in the federal government.
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:
You'll take away practical tips and techniques, whilst seeing some magic tricks too.
Adrian Reed is a true advocate of the analysis profession. In his day job, he acts as Principal Consultant and Director at Blackmetric Business Solutions where he provides Business Analysis consultancy and training solutions to a range of clients in varying industries. Adrian is a Past President of the UK chapter of the IIBA and he speaks internationally on topics relating to Business Analysis and business change. Adrian is author of the 2016 book, "Be a Great Problem Solver Now!", and the 2018 book "Business Analyst" due to be released later this year. You can read Adrian’s blog at www.adrianreed.co.uk.
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
Wouter Nieuwenburg has been working as a BA for over a decade, in both the traditional (waterfall) world as the Agile environment. Currently Wouter works for Accedis BV as a BA and he has been hired by both financial and government organisations as a BA, and as a coach for junior BA’s and agile teams.
Recent projects include development of smartphone apps and creating straight through processing between frontend and back office applications, in an Agile environment.
Wouter has been a speaker in the Netherlands about the need quality management systems in relation with workflow management and about Information Lifecycle Management. Based on that presentation he published an article in the magazine Office Insights.
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:
Alain Garsoux has more than 10 years experience in architecture. His main challenge is the introduction of architecture activities within organisation. IT means the delivery of value propositions to support decision making in investments like the sequence of future investments (roadmapping), the specification of reference architectures like IoT, IT4IT.
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:
Gert Vonck is the founder of Appfie.com, a startup focussed on getting organisations started with low coding. In addition, Appfie is specialized in Microsoft's low code platform PowerApps and Flow.
Before Appfie, Gert has been a Business Analyst for several years, primarily in financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank and KBC.
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.
Rowin Heymans has 4 years of experience as a business analyst / project manager at ACA IT-Solutions and over 10 years of experience in the IT industry. He is very committed to designing the ideal software by translating the requirements into the fastest and most efficient release possible. Moreover, he is a big proponent of DDD (Domain Driven Design) and event storming and also leads an internal knowledge group around these topics within ACA IT-Solutions.
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.
Koen De keersmaecker is a visual facilitator, visual trainer and visual coach. He is founder of Bizzuals, a visual incubator that empowers people and organisations to think with the pen. His main observation is “People think they understand each other, but in reality they don’t.”
As bikablo® certified global trainer, he trains and coaches people and teams in the bikablo® visualization technique — a technique which improves learning, knowledge transfer, dialogue and collaboration.
Over the last 10 years , he ha s been working as a pragmatic “Enterprise Lean-Agile Coach”, supporting companies big and small in their improvement journeys in immer changing markets, be it adoption Agile models or thriving as a start -up.
Today his passion is exploring new techniques and methods for inspiring people and how to make their messages stick. He lives with his wife and 2 sons in Antwerp.