Business Analysis

Tutorials

MM The Role of the Agile Business Analyst

Steve Adolph, Blue Agility

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 1:00pm

The business analyst (BA) role seems conspicuously absent from most agile methods. Does agile make the BA role obsolete? Certainly not! But how does a BA exploit the short cycle times and collaborative nature of agile methods? Drawing from the principles of lean product development flow, Steve Adolph introduces five principles for the agile BA—Open the Channels, Chart the Flow, Generate Flow, Lean Out the Flow, and Bridge the Flow. As a communicator, the BA must Open the Channels and Chart the Flow to align all stakeholders.

TF Risk Management: Project Management for Grown-Ups NEW

Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Many organizations are childlike. They blithely plan the project as if nothing will go wrong. And then, when something does go wrong, they are shocked and dismayed. Risk management is not just worrying about your project, and it is not about running away from risk. Risk management for software projects is all about when you make decisions and when you take action. How do you deal with uncertainty? When do you decide to deal with a risk while it is still just a risk, and when do you decide to wait to see if the risk does turn into a problem and manage it then?

TL Get the Requirements Right―the First Time NEW

Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 1:00pm

One group—customers, users, and business—need a software system to help them work more efficiently or make more money, but they don’t know how to build it. Another group—software developers and testers—know how to build the system, but they don’t know what it is supposed to do. Bridging this gap is where requirements—the work products describing the system accurately and concisely while at the same time not missing important customer and user needs—are essential.

TQ Product Owner Imperatives for Championing Agile Projects NEW

Paul Reed, EBG Consulting

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 1:00pm

Engaged and passionate product owners balance strategic and tactical activities to ensure that the right product is built—and built right. Yet how do these product owners guide planning toward longer-term goals while also ensuring that requirements are sufficiently understood for development and delivery? Join Paul Reed as he shares techniques for setting context and collaboratively establishing a shared understanding of requirements. Discover methods to envision the product and identify the stakeholders and their value considerations.

Concurrent Sessions

AT15 Aligning Teams, Architecture, and Governance

Dennis Stevens, LeadingAgile, LLC

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 3:00pm

Many enterprises are trying to create a more predictable flow, achieve ROI faster, improve quality, and be more responsive to the market. To this end, they attempt to transform to team-based agile, and then leverage scaled agile models to govern how requirements are defined, decomposed, coordinated, and tested. However, many of these efforts prove ineffective, and organizations fail to realize hoped for business benefits. In complex organizations, interdependencies between team design, architectural design, and governance contribute to this problem.