Date: 22 May 2018
Where: London

Agile and Business Analysis

The advent of Agile approaches has caused the role of the business analyst to be called into question with many business analysts wondering how they contribute when Agile is the order of the day. Is this the full story though when we consider the role of the business analyst? This session examines the importance of role clarity, the issues that may arise from misleading perceptions surrounding business analysis, and how business analysts might help organisations in their pursuit of the utopian state known as ‘agility’.

 

 

Debra Paul is the Managing Director of Assist Knowledge Development Ltd. Debra jointly edited and authored the publication, Business Analysis, and is also the co-author of Agile and Business Analysis, Business Analysis Techniques and The Human Touch. Debra has recently completed her doctoral research into the role of the business analyst and the business analysis service offering.

Debra is a regular speaker at business seminars and IS industry events. She has been a keynote presenter at business analysis conferences, delivering presentations such as ‘Business Analysis: The Third Wave’ and ‘Business Analysis: relevance and recognition’. Debra is a founder member of the BA Manager Forum, a networking organisation for senior BAs and BA managers, and was the VP Education on the inaugural IIBA UK board.

 

 

 

Panel Discussion

Debra was joined by Lynda Girvan amd Lia Petrosian for a discussion moderated by Nick de Voil.

 

Lynda Girvan has over 25 years’ experience in business and systems development as a consultant, professional trainer and practitioner in both the public and private sector.  Lynda works for CMC partnership where she is the Head of profession for BA as well are provides BA and agile consultancy to clients. Lynda has extensive experience of adding value to organisations through her business analysis work and is keen that agile software development is understood within the context of delivering business improvement.  Lynda developed the agile business analysis portfolio for AssistKD and was a member of the BA Conference Europe advisory panel from 2015-2017. Lynda is the co-author of the book ‘Agile and Business Analysis’ published by the BCS, Chartered Institute for IT in 2017 and has delivered numerous presentations and key notes to European and international audiences covering subjects on business analysis, agile and business change.

 

Lia Petrosian is a Consultant Business Analyst and Certified Product Owner, speaker at IRM UK Business Analysis Conference 2017. 

She is passionate about business agility and delivering value through an effective and trustful partnership with stakeholders and building elegant products aimed at solving real business problems. Lia has led analysis for complex multi-million projects and business transformation initiatives, and understand the challenges of running large programmes in an Agile way especially in the regulatory environment. Throughout her career as a business analyst, first in Logistics and then in Investment Banking in Liquidity Risk and Treasury Portfolio Management space, She had a huge exposure to different data-driven projects. So Lia decided to share my views on how this kind of projects can be transitioned to Agile and how Agile analysis techniques can help to simplify and streamline the delivery process at the BA Conference last year. Lia's other passion is helping BAs and BA teams to recognise their strengths, embrace Agile mindset and evolve their toolkit to deliver value in a dynamically changing market environment.

 

Nick de Voil is a certified management consultant specialising in helping organisations to design themselves from the outside in. He started his agile journey after reading Tom Gilb's "Principles of Software Engineering Management" while working as a project leader in investment banking in 1988. Since then he has become a member of the Agile Business Consortium and an accredited trainer for the APMG AgileBA and AgilePM certifications. Most recently, Nick has been working with organisations in central and local government to develop a new Agile Digital Services qualification. Nick is joint President of IIBA UK.

 

 



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