Final session at this year’s Building Business Capability conference with some closing thoughts from the chairs of the conference. Panels are always tough to blog but here are some takeaways:
- Strategy is central to anything you do at any scale
And I would add that they should be linked to the processes and decisions. - Many projects have problems that pre-date their start – it’s really important to focus on strategy to solve this.
- Models and architectures are a way to provide context for requirements.
- Concepts and vocabulary really matter in business analyst.
- The skills that got you here are not the skills that are going to take you forward.
Absolutely – decision modeling not just rules analysis, for example. - Recognize you are part of a ecosystem and work with everyone collaboratively to generate accountability.
For instance different stages of business analysis, business v IT v analytics etc. - Virtual requirements gathering is going to be a thing.
- It’s important to use business speak when collecting requirements to make sure the business can full participate.
- Agile is a trend in requirements so work out how to change and adapt your requirements process to be more agile.
- Don’t start with a technique like process mapping or business architecture but begin with something that targets a specific business pain point.
- Confucius said “Knowing to call things by their right names is the first step to wisdom.”
I would add that Leonardo da Vinci said that “knowing is not enough, we must apply (act).” It’s not enough to know what the rules are, we must apply them to our decisions. - Don’t center without excellence.
- How do you get management to accept centers of excellence, new approaches etc. Critical question going forward.
So that’s a wrap. If you want to learn more about Decision Management and Decision Modeling, check out our online training coming right up.
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Most of these “takeaways” are too generic that is fine. But as the word “agile” was not present at this year BBC (at least at keynotes), I am really glad to see this one:
“Agile is a trend in requirements so work out how to change and adapt your requirements process to be more agile.”
Two key agile principle are “test-driven” and “executable”, meaning there should be no documents that cannot be executed. Stand-alone requirements are typical examples of such documents. No wonder many BBC-2013 attendees asked a question: “OK, you got your requirements, what is the next step?”, and pure requirement vendors have to point attendees to the direction of BR and Decision management vendors. Not to be outdated, requirement management should be incorporated into the normal iteration loop:
“Requirements => Decision Modeling with Tests => Decision Model Execution against tests => Integration with IT => Requirements …”.
I hope next year BBC will show concrete examples of Business Requirement products being integrated with Business Rules and Decision Mngt products.
Jacob
As I said panels are hard to blog. I would agree though that more discussion of Agile is required along with more tools and methods that support it. This was also a request of the audience.
Like you I find the decision modeling approach supported by DMN lends itself to iteration and Agile as well as to interface- or test-first approaches
Let’s get some customer stories to present next year….