2020 Chapter Meeting Presentations

January 2020       Randy Babb  - Run Meaningful Meetings

February 2020     Recruiter Panel

March 2020         Thomas Haver - Collaborate on Your Product Vision (with LEGO)

April 2020        Emily Midgley - Of Course We Need Analysis in Agile!

May 2020             Jared Gorai - Don’t Miss the Point

June 2020           Joshua Russell - Fictional Test Data

July 2020             Summer Social Trivia Night

August 2020        Damian Synadinos - The Hidden Requirement

September 2020  Mindy Bohannon - I’m a BA Girl in an Agile World

October 2020      Vince Mirabelli - Enterprise Analysis, Not As Usual

November 2020   Chris Coppock - A Leader’s Guide to Building a Culture of Cyber Resilience

December 2020   Happy Holidays! 

Run Meaningful Meetings

“I hate meetings!” is a cry heard throughout Corporate America today.  Why is that? Is there some inherent flaw in meetings? If so, why do we continue to have them?  More importantly, why do we continue to attend them?  

Please bring your thoughts on what makes a lousy meeting and what makes a worthwhile meeting to our meeting.  (Does that sentence strike you as odd?)

In addition to ranting about meetings, we will explore some different formats for meetings such as  “Lean Coffee” and look for tips from how Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook run meetings. Finally, we will look at some dos and don’ts that you can try as a facilitator to increase the odds that people will attend and, more career enhancing, pay attention in your meetings.

Presentation Link

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Collaborate on Your Product Vision (with LEGO)

LEGO(R) sets are fun to build, but who has ever attempted to build a complete set without looking at the instructions? In this meeting, attendees will form teams and attempt to build a LEGO(R) set without instructions. Only one person from each team will be able to view the finished product before the team starts building. That person must share their vision with the team, who will attempt to build the LEGO(R) set as close to the instructions as possible without peeking.  Each group will learn different approaches to collaborate on product development during the meeting to build a set according to a customer’s needs. The activity highlights the two Quality Gaps of product development: (1) the gap between what we set out to build and the finished product; and (2) the gap between what customers expect and the finished product. Our goal is to close the two Quality Gaps so we deliver a product on- time and on-budget that customers will love.

Presented by Thomas Haver

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Of Course We Need Analysis in Agile!

No, we don’t necessarily need analysts. But we need people who can do analysis. That means we all need to stop worrying about job titles.

But what is analysis in agile, anyway? What skills, competencies and techniques are best suited for this type of work?

For those of us who are analysts in large companies now, where do we go? It turns out that our skills can be used in a variety of ways. From supporting development teams to supporting Product Owners to becoming Product Owners, people with analysis skills are a vitally important component to success in agile environments.

Learning Objectives:

- How in the real world, development team members support Product Owners

- Analysis techniques critical to delivering customer value

- Analysis techniques that help improve pace and quality

- Ways to increase your influence in an Agile environment 

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Don’t Miss the Point

Business analysis, like life is always changing but are we missing the point and are we overlooking fundamental skills in our pursuit of change? Jared will lead us on a journey to focus on the fundamentals of business analysis in defining needs and outcomes in the new world while also exploring how data analysis and customer experience are modifying our approach to business analysis.

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Fictional Test Data

Test data can tell a story at a glance. Most stories are obvious, like users in the QA5 environment with email addresses registered at qa5.com. There is an immediate value in the obvious stories; familiar conventions reveal the intent behind the data and make it easier to recognize and remember. What value can be attributed to stories that are more whimsical and nuanced? Let's talk about Noah Count, the user who never registered, and Maury Wards, who maximizes the loyalty points system. Let's look at the many stories that can be told by test data and turn fake information to fiction.

Download Joshua’s presentation here

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The Hidden Requirement

Summary

"Exploring Emotions with Placebos" - A thoughtful and practical look at the importance of emotional requirements in software.

Abstract

Traditionally, software development has focused on various functional and non-functional requirements (things a system should be or do). While this is important, there has been a lack of focus on emotional requirements (feelings that a system should induce). Why is this important?

Because the way we feel about software is important and should be considered!

A bold claim? Perhaps. And, as with any claim, it should be supported with evidence.  In this presentation, I stress the importance of emotional requirements and support the claim by providing relevant facts, opinions, statistics, quotations, examples, hypotheticals, and more.  Once I’ve sufficiently supported the claim, I offer a few practical methods by which to elicit, induce, and test emotional requirements. Finally, I use placebos as lens to view software and gain insight into emotional requirements.

Join me for a thorough and useful exploration of The Hidden Requirements!

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I’m a BA Girl in an Agile World

Do the Business Analyst's (BA) roles and responsibilities on an agile project differ from those on a waterfall project? Should the three amigos always include the analyst? At a minimum, the answer is certainly yes to both questions, although how the work is done depends on the team and project. During this session we will review how the role of a Business Analyst on an agile project can vary, and further discuss the impact on the development team and what makes a Business Analyst good at his/her job. All analysts bring excellent communication, collaboration, and trust to their work on project teams – but how we communicate and collaborate will differ.

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Enterprise Analysis, Not As Usual

Our organizations are a complex honeycomb of activity. With a bevy of components, artifacts, processes, and egos, it can be a lot to navigate. Fortunately, we can harness the awesome might and power of Enterprise Analysis! While Enterprise, or Strategic, Analysis typically involves taking both a high-level and detailed look at the different activities currently being undertaken in the enterprise and determining what opportunities exist to improve the organization. At the same time, seeking alignment on all of the different components, to ensure the left hand knows what the right is doing. And as if that wasn't complex enough, we now have to layer on the fact that our working world has fundamentally changed, and we are all forced to see all the pieces of the organization in this new, distributed reality. But we don't generally back down from a challenge, do we? In this session, building upon the skills and tactics borrowed from a new workshop of the same name, we'll set out the skills needed to move into an Enterprise Analysis role, and explore how to win the strategic war in our new battlegrounds, so that you, and your organizations, can continue to be successful, no matter what comes next.

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The Leader’s Guide to Building a Culture of Cyber Resilience

Your awareness of the basics drives cybersecurity to be a major part of your operational resilience strategy, and that strategy requires an investment of time and money. Your investment drives actions and activities that build and sustain a culture of cybersecurity.

Attendees will gain an understanding how readily available data can be used to first orient to this problem space. From there, the audience will get a better picture of their business operating environment in order to make better policy decisions on issues ranging from cyber insurance, supply chain management, and managing risk explicitly to be more effective.

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