Date: 16 Mar 2017
Where: Southampton

Journey to the centre of a thriving BA practice

 

Saffron House, Senior Business Analyst at Ordnance Survey will highlight recent changes, successes and challenges that the analysis team have dealt with over the past 12 months.  The team has grown by 50% permanent staff in 4 months, created a new “development” role and begun supporting the OS transformation programme.  Together with assistance from some colleagues highlighting case studies and explaining their career paths, she will explain how the way that the team operate is changing, outline why, and set out more likely changes over the coming 12 months, all in the context of the OS strategy. 

 

Saffron House has been a Business Analyst for 15 years.  Prior to joining Ordnance Survey, she worked as a BA in the financial sector for 10 years.  Most recently she has become the practice lead and manager of the analysis team.  Saffron is passionate about driving the profession forwards at OS and seeks to increase stakeholders understanding of the value analysts can bring to any business change.  She holds the BCS International Diploma in Business Analysis, is a professional mentor for the IIBA UK.  In 2015, together with a  colleague she founded a “Women in Technology” network  internal to OS and also an external local community “Hants Digital Women”. 

 

 

Requirements management - pain or pleasure?

Ed Ganly, Requirements Analyst at Ordnance Survey will lead a group discussion on the value of relating requirements to other project artefacts created by solution architects and implementation teams. How do we choose the  requirement management tools to help us store and relate requirements? How do we overcome the challenges of keeping requirements relevant, up-to-date and controlled within and between related projects?

Ed Ganly has been a Requirements Analyst for 11 years.  Prior to joining Ordnance Survey, he worked as a BA in manufacturing sector for 10 years and before that in distribution operations management.  He has led requirements management work at OS for key projects and excels in ensuring detailed requirements are usable, managed and controlled”. 

 

 

 

Working in a (FR)Agile Environment

 

Most companies work with Onshore / Offshore IT development and today the Change professionals has a great deal of responsibility to deal with people of different cultures who are stretched geographically to facilitate change. Fragile environment in this context refers to teams being distributed across different countries and how as  change professionals we can work at our best endeavours to link business and IT to facilitate change and still hold the values of Agile. This paper will look to identify the key challenges in running an Agile project in distributed team and identify some creative strategies that can be applied to make it work.

The key messages to be taken away:

  • Collaboration – how can we work as one team and ensure everyone maintains focus on delivering the customer outcome?
  • Communication – How can we communicate effectively in a distributed environment?
  • Cultural – How can we empower our offshore colleagues to be part of an evolving & self managing team and not ‘report to us’?
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    Following Menaka Priya Shanmugavadivelu’s graduation in Computer Technology she went to gain her MBA and she has been working for multiple insurance organisations in the role of Business Analyst and Project Manager for more than 13 years. Passionate to deliver business solutions that contributes to the profits of the organisation Menaka has worked on multiple assignments. She has experience of working in India for 7 years and 6 years in the UK and has adopted both the work cultures and now working towards linking this structure to be at its best. At Aviva she works with the Analytics feature team to develop solutions that include pricing changes. Out of her professional work she loves spending time with her family and is also interested in personal and professional mentoring and coaching.  Fresh, Energetic, Mother of two but still young and this is the best way I would like to be described!



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