2021 BAcon Speakers and Sessions
10 BA Techniques for the Product Owner's Toolbox
Whether you’re a Product Owner, part of an Agile team, or looking to expand your knowledge of Agile, this session will help you select the right technique for your situation. We’ll review the top 10 Agile techniques that can lead you to success. Some are commonly used, and there are some that might be new to you! With experience as a Business Analyst, development team member, and Agile coach, the presenter also brings experience to help you avoid common pitfalls.
View Emily’s presentation here
Emily Midgley
Emily Midgley is the President of the Cleveland Chapter of IIBA and has over 15 years of business analysis experience in the insurance industry. She led business analysis for programs to implement leading-edge technology like big data and mobile apps. As an Agile coach, Emily brings BA practices to product managers and product owners throughout the enterprise to increase focus on customer value.
Analyze It! Explaining software analysis clearly
Do you ever have a conversation with someone that struggles to understand what you do? Do you ever hear the sayings "I don't code so IT isn't for me"? Do you ever try explaining software analysis to your child and they don't understand it? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you!
Join me in a brief, but valuable conversation as we discuss how to introduce software analysis concepts to individuals, especially to our young innovators of tomorrow. Throughout this time, we'll talk about the importance of closing the digital divide in America, the push for young minds to get involved into technology, and how we as community leaders can help support.
Kristen Elliott
Technology Professional, Educator, Author, Twin Mom, Coffee Lover
Kristen Elliott is an author, businesswoman, technology professional, and educator with a background of various analysis and consulting positions. She currently serves as a digital product owner for a Fortune 100 company and teaches software analysis principles at the undergraduate level.
An ambassador of STEAM, Kristen focuses on the advocacy of others to learn more about software analysis and how the power of the arts fuel creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. She aims to support that mission through teaching, writing, and speaking about various technology concepts and about the power of the arts in a simple and fun way in hopes of others to become empowered to learn more themselves.
An Analyst's View of Security Requirements
In my years of experience as an analyst and manager, I have found that there is a lot of technical and detailed training for developers and cyber analysts around cybersecurity and threat modeling. However, if you are a typical business analyst or agile line analyst who is not involved in threat modeling, what do you need to know about cybersecurity and information security requirements? Do you know of an easy and fast way to create cyber and information security stories? This presentation will provide you with what are the important questions you should be asking? It should also provide you with a few ideas on how to create reusable non-functional user stories for your team that both saves time and effort and provides your team with the information they need.
This presentation will help you understand:
-the risks associated with cyber attacks
-the role of the analysis practitioner in managing SDLC security requirement and the challenges that go with it.
-the analysis needed to support the software development security standards and practices and processes within your organization
-industry-wide security standards and practices to assess and minimize risk.
View Ryan’s presentation here
Ryan Skoglund
Ryan is a 30+ year career IT Professional, certified in Software Quality Assurance, He has spent his career improving the quality of requirements and analysis within Nationwide and its partners. His passion for delivering quality requirements comes from the great people he has worked with. His extensive quality assurance and business analysis experience began in roles prior to becoming a Manager of Analysis in 1999. As a former People and Practice Leader at Nationwide, he managed a talented team of Analysts that work as Program/Project Analyst Leads or Agile Line Analysts as part of the Requirements and Testing (R&T) department that were part of the Program and Application Services organization at Nationwide. He is currently looking to move to his next new opportunity to continue his passion for quality requirements and analysis.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: How to Future Proof Your BA Career
We all know Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are two huge factors in the change in technology and business. But what is their impact on you? What will your job look like five years from now? Will it even exist in five, 10 or 20 years? And what will happen to the organization and industry you work for?
All these questions and more can be answered in this 45 to 60 minute talk around AI and ML. We will discuss the definitions of these two terms, how they impact business and workers, and what things business analysts can do today to prepare for the future.
Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts is an IT industry professional with more than 22 years of experience in bringing software to market. His industry certifications include those from ICAgile, Cisco, CompTIA, Microsoft and the Scaled Agile Framework.
Improving Outcomes with Evidence Based Management
As we work to deliver in the midst of change and uncertainty, it's easy to lose sight of the deeper goals - improving outcomes, reducing risks and optimizing investments. Through a set of interactive exercises, you will learn how to use the Evidence-Based Management (EBM) four Key Value Areas (KVAs) and empirical cycles to make better decisions and continuously improve toward strategic goals and objectives.
Mark Wavle
Mark Wavle is an experienced Agile practitioner, coach, Professional Scrum Trainer (PST), and National Lead for Agile at Insight Digital Innovation. He spent 10 years as a Business Analyst before joining his first Scrum team. In the 13 years since, he has been a Development Team member, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Agile Coach, and trainer for Scrum and Kanban teams in both small and scaled environments. He is passionate about helping leaders, teams, and individuals improve their work and the valuable products they produce through professional coaching and highly engaging education. As a sought-out speaker and trainer, Mark has created and delivered high-impact training and presentations at companies, industry groups, and conferences in the United States and Europe.
Collaborate on Your LEGO(R) Vision
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 & on-budget that customers will love.
View Thomas’s presentation here
Thomas Haver
Thomas is presently serving as a Test Automation Architect. He leads a team of testers, ops engineers, and production support analysts in the adoption of DevOps practices. Previously, he led the enterprise automation support of 73 applications at Huntington National Bank that encompassed testing, metrics & reporting, and data management. Thomas has a background in Physics & Biophysics, with over a decade spent in research science studying fluorescence spectroscopy and microscopy before joining IT.
Effectively Using Value Stream Mapping, A Workshop
Have you ever been interested in exactly how to run a value stream mapping exercise? This workshop will give you the knowledge and experience to help answer that question, as well as facilitate your own session as soon as you return to work.
We will define the following:
1. What are value streams?
2. What is value stream mapping?
3. Why do I use value stream mapping?
4. What metrics do I use to measure my value stream?
5. What is the Theory of Constraints and how to apply it to value stream mapping.
The workshop will start as an information session to get you familiar with the things to define above. Then we will work together to map a pre-defined value stream so that you can learn how to facilitate the session.
During the actual mapping session you will learn:
1. How to map a current value stream, what metrics to capture, how to help the team understand these metrics
2. Take the current state value stream and analyze it through the Theory of Constraints
3. Produce a future state value stream with improvements that need to be made
4. Create an analysis for next steps of improvement after the future state value stream is met.
If you come to this workshop, you can expect the following outcomes:
1. When and why to use value stream mapping
2. How to convince your team to use value stream mapping as a tool
3. How to capture a value stream and analyze it
4. How to continue to use value stream mapping and analysis to improve people (team), process, and tooling.
Logan Daigle
Logan is an Agile and DevOps Coach from Charlotte, NC. He has been involved with providing Technical Excellence and implementing DevOps solutions for 14 years in the military, government, healthcare, retail, finance, and software product industries. In those 14 years he has worked along side technology and business teams and leadership to help orient their measures of success to improving customer outcomes.
In moving toward outcome based thinking and processes, Logan has witnessed how proper output measurement and observability can really help a team work well together. In addition to this, measuring what matters and working to make things as simple as possible ensure that the technology teams he has observed deliver software sooner, safer and happier. It is a blessing to see teams learn how to become self-managing to deliver great outcomes for their customers and their business all while becoming happier employees and technologists.
In general, Logan has a passion for being Agile, doing DevOps well and using agile engineering practices to build, test and deploy software. He has value stream mapping, development, Agile coaching and DevOps experience. His experiences have been in support of both Windows and Linux infrastructure, and many tools that are key to the success of applications in both. He is currently focusing on evangelizing in the technology community to bring DevOps to the masses.
Logan is a husband and father of 3 boys. His hobbies are running and hiking when he's not chasing the kids around the house.
Example Mapping: The New Three Amigos
Example Mapping is a collaboration technique used by teams to help refine requirements. Every team should have a set of “ready” criteria that includes some kind of workshop between development team members to establish a shared understanding. In a time-boxed Example Mapping session, rules will summarize examples or constraints about a user story, and questions about outcomes or dependencies are documented for future refinement. The end result are requirements written as user behavior with a shared understanding among all roles on an Agile team. The audience will participate in a live Example Mapping session and learn how to implement the workshop within their own team.
View Thomas’s presentation here
Thomas Haver Bio
Five Characteristics Needed to be a Great Leader
A leader is not a job title but can be someone at any level. A leader is a coach that helps a person or group to develop. Today's business environment is collaborative and resembles more of a sports team mindset. Athletes have a "team-first" attitude. Leaders need to be mentors and develop their team or peers. Business Analysts can have more influence on the company direction than upper management. A Senior Business Analyst must be a leader and mentor.
Five Characteristics:
1. Ego: A Leader needs to put their own ego aside.
2. Instill a team attitude: Team members need to be flexible for the team's good.
3. Encourage Innovation and Questions: Leaders encourage questions and new ideas.
4. Encourage Excellence over Perfection: Team members must accept they will never be perfect.
5. Lead with Your Heart: A Leader shows how much they care for their team.
Learning Objectives:
1. Why BAs must be leaders and mentors.
2. How to become better BAs by leveraging leadership skills.
3. Why other team members better accept BAs as leaders.
Judy Alter
"The Optimistic BA"
Judy Alter, CBAP®, FLMI, ACS, PCS & HIA
• Public speaker, coach, and Senior Business Systems Analyst with over 17 years of business analysis experience.
• CEO/Owner of Judy Alter Speaker & Business Analysis Services LLC (present)
• Retired from Mutual of Omaha in March 2020 after more than 35 years
• IIBA Global Chapter Council Chair (present)
• 2021 Tri-BADD Conference (IIBA Raleigh Chapter)
• 2021 Minnesota PDD (IIBA MSP Chapter)
• 2020 BBC Speaker
• 2020 Ending Keynote Palmetto BA Day
• 2020 Ending Keynote Cedar Rapids BADD
• 2020 Speaker at Numerous IIBA Chapter Events
• 2019 Heartland IIBA PDD Speaker
• 2018 IIBA Kansas City Agile Chapter Event
Judy is known as charismatic, optimistic, humorous, and is a successful leader.
She is engaging and has command of business analysis skills but also people skills.
Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for the Business Analyst
0:00 Involvement of attendees to determine their experience with AI and ML
0:05 Definition of Artificial Intelligence
0:10 Introduction of Agents, Environments, Precepts, and Actions
Environment - Observability: Partially or Fully Observable
- Deterministic or Stochastic
- Episodic or Sequential
- Static or Dynamic
- Discrete or Continuous
0:20 Single, Multiple Agents, Adversarial Agents
Performance Measure, Environments, Repertoire of actions, Sensors
Simple Reflex Agent
Model-based Reflex Agent
Goal-based Agent
Utility-base Agent
Learning Agent
0:30 Searching
States
Initial State
Actions
Transition Model
Goal States
Action Cost
Performance
Completeness
Cost Optimality
Time Complexity
Space Complexity
Searches – Breadth-first, Uniform-Cost, Depth-First, Depth-limited,
Bidirectional
Informed Search
Heuristics, Greedy best-first, A*
0:40 Definition of Machine Learning
0:45 Machine Learning examples
0:50 Audience Questions
Naeem Shariff
Senior Lecturer at The Ohio State University in the Department of CSE (Computer Science & Engineering) teaching CSE 3521 and CSE 5521 “Survey of Artificial Intelligence: Basic Techniques”. My research interests are in the areas of Computer Graphics, Artificial Intelligence, and Database Systems. I have published in the areas of scientific visualization (volume rendering, iso-surface rendering, large data visualization, and GPU-based methods), medical visualization, image-based rendering, as well as volume and image segmentation. I have taught extensively in most all areas of Computer Science at OSU (both the Main and Mansfield campuses) and Wittenberg University.
Product Ownership in a COVID world
Being a Product Owner is both exciting and challenging. This is even more true when implementing a Product Team culture from scratch during the COVID challenges in 2020. Join us for a discussion around how State Auto switched from a waterfall IT development model to an Agile Product Team model during one of the most challenging environments in recent years.
Kevin Kirby
Kevin has worked in a variety of areas in the insurance industry over the past 27 years. This includes positions as a claim assoicate, auto damage manager, subrogation, total loss manager and business analyst. Kevin has focused his time over the last year and a half as the State Auto Claims Digital Transformation Product Owner with the goal of enhancing claims capabilities and implementing automations that will
provide an easier, faster, and more accurate end to end claims process.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA): What is it? Is it right for my project?
Review of RPA solutions, capabilities and implementation insights for Business Analyst
Kevin Hobbs
Over 20 Years project experience as a Business Analyst, Project Manager and Scrum Master
Sustainability with Business Analysis
Environmental sustainability is here to stay. Many companies are promising net-zero initiatives, but do they know what it's going to take?
It's going to take all of us. I'll show you how business analysts, product owners, and others can lead the good fight of sustainability from the requirement to the backlog.
Michael Fearer
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio playing baseball and golf. At the age of 17, I made award winning discoveries around Alzheimer's disease. Then, I went on to graduate from The Ohio State University with an Honors Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I built my first startup at age 20 and was accepted into an accelerator where I was featured alongside Under Armour’s CEO as top CEOs to watch.
I started my consulting career at IBM where I have now worked as a Business Analyst, Product Owner, Design Thinker, digital accessibility advocate, design system consultant, and sustainability leader.
For four years, I've been leading IBM's largest sustainability based organization and have been incorporating sustainability into our daily work.
I bring cross-industry project experience with an engineering and entrepreneurial background. I've helped more than 12 major corporations transform their digital presence and constantly strive to innovate in new ways to work.
The Rise and Benefits of Robotic Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a term given to technology that allows developers to programmatically emulate the actions of a human to execute a business process. RPA often operates on the user interface (UI) layer to capture data or interact with an application or across multiple applications to perform tasks that are considered repetitive or time-consuming. Originally focused on business processes, many RPA solutions now integrate with SDLC tools. While the promises of easy adoption and scaling are made by almost every vendor, the reality is long-term commitment to an RPA program is the same as any new application. In this presentation, the audience will learn about the benefits of RPA, multiple RPA use cases, and how RPA can be assimilated into a enterprise.
View Thomas’s presentation here
Thomas Haver Bio
The Science of Focus: Unleashing the Power of Focused Teams
Coffee runs, manager drive-by, hallway conversations, pressing walk-up questions, texts, IMs, DMs, Email, Frequent Meetings - so many different voices calling for our attention. In our modern environments, we become busy as can be, but sometimes not accomplishing things that are important. In this session we will look at some of the research from Industrial and Organization Psychology that offers useful input into how we are able to focus and what situations are not conducive to focus. We will then spend time in groups discussing and evaluating approaches to help increase the quality focus of our agile teams.
Kyle Morton
Stop starting and start finishing
Kyle Morton has over nineteen years of experience building Agile teams for software development or other technology delivery. The last three years, Kyle has leveraged this experience to enable companies to build successful Agile delivery teams through Agile coaching and Agile training with Insight Enterprises. Additionally, he has held and practiced roles including Business Analyst, Quality Assurance, User Experience Architect, Agile Manager, Project Manager, and Program Manager. Kyle has lead agile sessions at conferences including Southern Fried Agile in Charlotte, Agile Midwest in Saint Louis, TriAgile in Raleigh, and last year at Music City Tech in Nashville.
Transforming the BA's tool chest with Value Stream Mapping
Value Stream Mapping is quickly becoming a transformational tool in team members’ tool chests to handle people, process and tooling documentation and improvement. Companies from start-up size to multi hundred thousand employees use value stream mapping to document, plan and approach organizational transformation with focus and resolve. This means that the BA in many organizations can employ this tool in order to help their team or a team of teams discover how to work better together, manage and eliminate dependencies and remove waste from their daily work.
If you are a BA who is looking to help your team improve their productivity, manage their dependencies, understand product and process risk, or just interested in what value stream mapping can help you do, this session is right for you.
The outcome of this session will be that you discover the intent of value stream mapping and how to effectively use value stream mapping as a tool to drive continuous improvement as an individual, on your team(s) and in your organization.
The intent of value stream mapping is to capture the current state of your value stream, document where you want to improve it, create a future state value stream with the improvements, make changes to get to the improvements, evaluate if those changes effected outcomes you wanted your team and your business to achieve, then repeat the process.
In the session, we will define:
1. How does value stream mapping help with my Lean, Agile or DevOps practice(s)
2. What is a value stream?
3. What is value stream mapping?
4. What are the metrics I need to capture to know how well I’m doing?
We will then jump into how value stream mapping can be used as a tool to improve your daily work. I will teach you how to use the following metrics as outputs to determine whether or not you are meeting your stated outcomes:
1. Flow - Work In Progress, Efficiency by phase, Overall Efficiciency, Lead Time, Process Time, Change Failure Rate
2. Risk - Tying defect work to hot spots of activity.
3. Net Promoter Score - do my employees like and promote my products and my process?
4. Real Time Compliance - The percentage of activities that are completed satisfactorily in the value stream, who completed them, when they were completed, so that a review at the end of the process doesn’t take days or weeks, instead it takes hours.
Logan Daigle Bio
Transitioning from Business Analysts to Product Managers - Practical Learnings
This session will focus on the practical experience we have had in moving from Business Analysts to Product Managers. We will be covering the lessons learned, best practices, and skills needed to be successful in making the transition to Product Management. We will be discussing the overlapping skills that can be capitalized to navigate the next stage of your career. We’ll also touch on how to bridge the gaps between the two roles.
Mansi Anand & Mark Roehl
We are results-focused Product Leaders with 20+ years of delivery expertise across diverse technologies and industries. As Product Managers, we employ Agile techniques to lead cross-functional teams across requirements definition, delivery, and product optimization.
We hold certifications in project management (PMP, SAPM), agile processes (CSM), and analysis and testing (CBAP, ITQSB, ASEP). We are sought out as coaches and instructors and look forward to sharing our experiences to help others thrive and succeed.
Building Your Brand
Learn why a strong personal brand is important for successful recruiting efforts, define the key components of a compelling personal profile, and learn ways to enhance your personal brand beyond your profile.
Jenna Morris
Connecting businesses and individuals with the right solution is Jenna Morris’ key to success as the Business Development Manager at Maven.
Approaching the role and growth of Maven with tenacity and a service- minded attitude, Jenna provides clients with a hands-on, white-glove service approach. She has proven herself to be a highly flexible leader, delivering tangibles that have far exceeded the expectations of her clients by adapting quickly to ever-shifting corporate priorities.
With more than 6 years of experience in Sales, Project Management and PR, Jenna brings a key perspective to clients and Maven.
Jenna is an active volunteer with A Kid Again and Forever Forgotten Best Friends, being a dog lover herself she is very involved with any non-profit involving animals. A Columbus native and Ohio State University graduate, she enjoys spending time with her family and good friends, as well as colleagues throughout the local business community. She prides herself on community involvement, networking and building the brand of Maven.
Sarah Snider
As the Marketing and Communication Manager, Sarah Snider looks to connect clients with Maven through brand strategy and driving development of go-to-market strategies.
With 5+ years of experience in delivering exceptional marketing campaigns, being a self-starter and creator is her expertise. From creating multi-channel content to client engagement her purpose is to deliver results.
Growing up on a farm outside of Columbus taught Sarah the importance of community and hard work. Through a continued partnership with the Columbus Early Learning Center, Sarah and the team at Maven demonstrate their appreciation for the educators at the centers through catered lunches. Her passion for education and educators stems from being raised by a family of teachers and school administrators.