You are starting a project. You are performing individual tasks, delivering work products. How do you know if the results of your work are valuable? How do you know if you are heading in the right direction? Without a plan – at least a framework – you don't know because you haven't defined the goals of your work, expected outcomes, the value you will deliver to stakeholders and team members. 

Let's avoid such risks through planning – a fundamental activity, yet often overlooked. One of the key skills of a business analyst is analytical thinking – so let's apply this skill to plan our activities.

I propose a relatively simple approach to planning analytical work. By using this approach, you will avoid the risk of performing activities that add no value, that are simply unnecessary. You will define work products that are crucial for the project's success. You will determine what skills are necessary to execute the plan and whether the team currently possesses those skills.

Despite years of efforts to improve the professional approach to developing software systems, many of these projects continue to fail. Investigations into these failures invariably denote poor interactions between humans, both within development teams and with customers and users, as a key factor. Recent evolution in development approaches, like the human-centred design and extreme programming, try to address this problem, but until now, an overall view was missing. In this presentation we integrate these initiatives into a simple model, that arranges six key skills along two axes (customer–team and problem– solution) around communication as a core. Many techniques are available to implement these skills in development teams, so failure will no longer be the usual outcome.

Please note it is a joint presentation with Hans van Loenhoud: 2nd chair of IREB, a consultant at Taraxacum

We would also propose to lead a roundtable on this topic as the main theme

Testing conferences focus mostly on aspects related to testing and quality control. But assuring the quality of products requires much more: analysis of the context, identification of quality requirements, planning processes allowing to meet specific requirements, establishing means for quality control, continuous improvement... 

Assuring quality of software products requires holistic quality management.

The idea of this roundtable is to discuss possible solutions for managing quality in IT. 

I would like to run this roundtable with Joel Oliveira. Other experts are also welcomed to support moderation of the discussion.

One of the main challenges in IT projects is managing complexity. Typical projects involve many stakeholders, dozens of requirements, artifacts evolved from requirements... There may be various relationships between artifacts, some artifacts are derived from other ones, some stakeholders may require specific artifacts to be delivered... Some stakeholders have special information requirements.

BA artifacts like goals, needs and requirements define the scope and shape of the final solution. Their importance cannot be questioned. The only remaining question is how to manage the information to be able to control the scope and progress of work, to communicate effectively with stakeholders and "see the whole"?

How to manage complex, international and strategic project following Agile when there is a need to ensure formal quality management processes?

The main objective of this talk is to discuss the possible ways of incorporating some formality into the Agile world so that the required level of quality and necessary evidence and processes can be ensured. Presented solutions will be based on a real case study of a project conducted for one of the strategic customers of IT organization.

During the talk, I will present approaches to establishing quality process – starting from defining the plan, organizing the resources needed to implement the plan, to progress monitoring and results from evaluation. I will explain some challenges and problems we faced – problems resulted from project internal and external environment and the development approach itself. I will also present a solution – a process of quality management developed together with the team. 

The current business is more and more demanding. Business Analyst is now expected to be not only the person responsible for product definition and documentation – he or she should support the business itself.

I will show how concepts like UX, service design, Agile principles can be used to help our job and make us a better BA. I will show how important is to use other disciplines and build an interdisciplinary approach to improve the value we provide.