IIBA-Columbus

Agile Track

Emily Midgley - Of Course We Need Analysis in Agile!

Samantha Wade - User Stories in a Waterfall World: When a Large Cross-Functional Project is Running Waterfall, but Your Team is Agile

Mansi Anand and Mark Roehl - Cheaper, Better Faster: A Case Study on how We Reduced Waste within Nationwide

Linz Vallelil - The Forgotten Story of User Stories

Michael Roberts - Mission to Mars: An Agile Adventure

Matt Badgley - Stop Talking, Start Building - Trust..It’s Time!

Big Data/Analytics Track

Ursula Cottone - The Influence of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) on Enterprise Analytics

Ganes Kesari - How Organizations Can Gain Strategic Advantage When Everyone is Applying AI

Collaboration Track

Mindy Bohannon - Process Flows: When Pictures Reveal Everything

John Hrivnak - Business Analysis for Leaders

Melissa Keesing - How I Handled a Difficult Conversation and Survived to Tell the Tale!

Dev-Ops Track

Logan Daigle - This IS the Generative Culture You Are Looking For…

Taranjeet Kaur - Capturing Requirements for Containers

Tony Mandator - Managing Fear to Keep the Project on Track

Miscellaneous Track

Mike Hand - Let’s Talk About Documentation (But More Fun Than That Sounds)

Sarala Pandey - How Do You Change the World? By Developing Future Women Leaders

Richard Reichard - The Discipline of Innovation

Damian Synadinos - Talking About Talking

Thomas Haver - Develop Yourself and Uplift Others

Jennifer Bentley - Impact Mapping

Cindy Hufnagle - Off the Happy Path: Looking at Requirements from a Tester’s Point of View

mobile/Digital Track

Kate Gwynne - The Empathy Lab: Understanding Digital Accessibility

Paul F. Meeker - Mock-Ups for Mobile

Cheaper, better, faster. A case study on how we reduced waste within Nationwide Annuities

The future is now, and the future is lean. 
As we embrace agile and DevOps practices we are reaffirmed that in order to compete in the marketplace, companies NEED to reduce waste and inefficient processes. 

We would like to share our case study of how we worked with the Nationwide Annuity Group to help move them from bulky processes that involved many hand-offs and longer wait times to a continuous faster delivery model. We would also like to share the factors and techniques that made this successful and the impediments that held back progress.

View Mansi and Mark’s presentation here.

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The Discipline of Innovation

Peter Drucker noted in his classic 1985 HBR article titled “The Discipline of Innovation”, 

"What all successful entrepreneurs I have met have in common is not a certain type of personality, but a commitment to a systematic practice of innovation."

But what do we know about the systematic practice of innovation? Much has been learned over the intervening three and a half decades about the systematic practice innovation. This talk will look some of the disciplines that convert what is sometimes approached as a desperate need to think out of the box into a more methodical process for developing and implementing innovative ideas.

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Capturing Requirements for Containers

All the noise happening as companies adopt Docker Containers at a remarkable rate just can't get unnoticed. 
Dockers are gaining immense momentum as they not only increase productivity and efficiency but the deployment velocity soars so high by Dockerizinig DevOps pipeline.
Multiple projects are getting spin up everyday across organization just to move their server applications from VM to containers.
With these projects it becomes pertinent for a Business Analyst to capture pieces of requirements created by containerization and contribute in making transition successful for the organizations.The presentation will be help an Analyst understand how these Containers changes the way Infrastructure is laid out in an organizations and how one can ensure that they don't risk app Performance, Security by asking right set of questions while writing down these requirements.
We will be talking about different configurations available with Containerization and how they enable a Cloud native environment as well.

View Taranjeet’s presentation here.

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This IS the generative culture you are looking for...

WE ARE ALL LOOKING FOR THE BEST OF DEVOPS
As a DevOps Coach, I have had the privilege of working with many organizations in the world who are focused on improving their organizations. They range in industry from military, government and financial institutions to retail and staffing. From highly regulated and high risk environments to those that seem to always be on the cutting edge of technology and culture.
I'm here to say that DevOps Awesomeness is not just for the big 4 (Amazon, Apple, Google, and Netflix)!
There are people, teams and organizations in the audience who have built their own cultures that will enable Awesomeness in 2018. These cultures are generative in nature, this means that the cultures are built upon the notion that people are people and not resources, that we should trust our team mates and people, that we should foster innovation by having a culture of experimentation that doesn't punish failure and learns quickly from it.
As a coach and consultant, I often walk into situations where leaders and their teams think that they need culture before tooling or vice versa. I think that this is the wrong conversation to have and instead of arguing for the chicken vs. the egg, we employ systems thinking to both culture and tooling and make the best decisions for our organizations. We also get to teach everyone to lead, that it's not just the responsibility of the people with leadership roles to provide the leadership necessary to move from low or medium performer to high performer.
I will also share how transformational leadership influences an organization to continuously improve, always looking to provide and improve value in trying to balance an organizations need to innovate with cost savings. Regardless of whether there is a transformational leader, Organizations that are high performers are not penny wise and a pound foolish, they are experiencing how to move faster and become more profitable and accept risk profiles all at the same time. They are using speed to drive innovation AND security.
This will be an interactive session in which you will have a chance to participate and provide examples of things you don't like in your organization for anecdotes of how our customers have improved their own situations. My talk will include anecdotes of customer interactions as well as information and stories from my past lives as a developer and devops engineer.
Finally, I will weave everything together to help prescribe the metrics you might want to gather to know which direction you are heading and what you might use to collect the metrics and act on them to make good, data-driven decisions.

View Logan’s presentation here.

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Let's talk about documentation (but more fun that that sounds)

Street signs. Clothing tags. LEGO instructions. Furniture assembly instructions. Every field requires documentation, but some are far better at it than others. We'll take a tour through the highlights and low-lights, hits and misses -- and then see what we can apply back to the field of software development.

View Mike’s presentation here.

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How do you change the world? By developing future women leaders

Change begins at home. Many first generation disadvantaged immigrants to this country do not attend college, which means their children do not have adequate guidance on pursing higher-level education. The community can come together to provide help to these children with code camps. This past summer, a Young Women in Tech code camp was held in Columbus for members of the Bhutanese-Nepali Refugee Community. More than a dozen experts in technology volunteered to teach girls aged 13-17 about computer programming, accessibility, user-centered design processes, cyber security, Photoshop, software development and desktop management. The volunteers taught the girls about the extensive career options within technology, with each volunteer focusing on their respective area of expertise. The training was supplemented by college admissions officers providing education guidance and a course on resume building. The entire camp was sponsored by a local community college with financial support for meals, equipment, and clothing provided by local businesses.

In this session, the audience will learn how to uplift the next generation of leaders through supplemental training opportunities outside of school. The audience will be shown how to organize a code camp locally, from securing facilities for training, to financial support, to soliciting volunteer teachers in technology. 

View Sarala’s presentation here.

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THE EMPATHY LAB: Understanding Digital Accessibility

DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY - guided by laws such as WCAG and Section 508, these principles and guidelines can be difficult to understand and easy to ignore, until it's too late. Join us in the Empathy Lab where you will experience first hand what Digital Accessibility is, how it impacts your organization and your role, and how it can reduce risk and increase usability for your websites and mobile applications.

View Kate’s presentation here.

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Process Flows - When Pictures Reveal Everything

Pictures say 1,000 words and visual illustration is always an effective method for explaining complex ideas to each other. Process flows are a graphical representation of how things get done in an organization. It helps us to visualize the details of the process and guide our decision making. We use it to easily illustrate major components of a process, including the inputs, outputs, steps, decision points, and interactions with other systems. Process flows help us identify bottlenecks, points of contact with customers, and highlight value-adding activities. 

The effectiveness of the process flow depends on the writer’s experience and knowledge. We must be cognizant of possible pitfalls of hard to ready flows. If we create a confusing flow it may inhibit our ability to identify improvement opportunities. During this session we will practice several techniques for doing analysis with process mapping while creating flows. 

View Mindy’s presentation here.

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The Forgotten Story of User Stories

User stories are the most popular method for documenting requirements among requirements analysts in an agile environment. User stories are an integral part of several Agile methodologies including XP and Scrum. Poorly defined requirements are considered to be a leading factor in project failure. In this session, our focus will be on user stories, from its origin to its evolution over the years. We will consider their purpose and the traits which create a compelling user story. We will reflect on the patterns for splitting user stories and briefly talk about different genres of stories. As an outcome, I hope participants would think of user stories as more than a tool for capturing requirements and see it as a vehicle that carries the value to the user.

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The Influence of the Chief Data Office (CDO) on Enterprise Analytics

As the Chief Data Officer at three separate regional banks, I have had the opportunity to build and drive a data management strategy with the goal of changing the way data is treated throughout the Enterprise. Many organizations struggle with challenges in accessing data, lack of practical data governance, unknown or poor data quality, and unclear data management-related roles and responsibility. In my role as CDO, I have been able to mature organizations from foundational capabilities to differentiating and transformational competence by focusing on business intelligence evolution, improved data analytics and reporting capabilities, and strong engagement of business and technology stakeholders. Delivering business outcomes tied to the strategy of the company is key to the success of any Chief Data Office.

View Ursula’s presentation here.

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How Organizations can Gain Strategic Advantage when Everyone is applying AI

In just about a decade, the quote ‘Data is the new Oil’ has turned into a cliché, thanks to the hype around buzzwords such as ‘Big Data’, ‘AI’ and ’Data Science’. It is now a foregone conclusion that an organization’s data is truly its hidden treasure chest, waiting to be discovered. Today, every organization is trying to apply AI to their business. So, where’s the differentiation?

While the destination is clear, what confounds everyone is the path to be taken to reach this pot of gold. Organizations run into a series of challenges in the adoption of AI, right from the start. They are faced with several questions along this journey: How to get started and create a sound AI roadmap? Which initiatives are right for them, and how do they build the execution muscle? How can this initial spark be sustained and harvested for long-term benefits?

This session will address these questions and lay out an AI framework for enterprises. It will draw from experiences of consulting in AI over the past decade to highlight the common challenges and practical guidelines to tackle them. Case studies would be shared to show how organizations have successfully leveraged AI for specific business ROI.

Learning Objectives from the Session:
• How organizations have used large scale data to their benefit
• What kind of decisions are best driven through data (and which ones aren't) 
• Innovative ways to monetize the data assets that are already in one’s hands 
• Interactive industry examples showing relevance of these techniques for organizations
• What tools, talent, and support mechanisms are available in the market today

Outcomes:
At the end of the workshop, the participants will learn the following: 
• Business applications of big data, AI and data visualization for competitive advantage 
• How to manage large scale data and set up the infrastructure to get insights from this data 
• What it takes to transform big data from pilot initiatives to real business applications
• The skills, tools, training and partner ecosystem needed to leverage data science 

View Gane’s presentation here.

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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

View Emily’s presentation here.

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Talking about talking

About 1 year ago, I began speaking professionally. About 3 years ago, I began speaking at conferences. About 40 years ago, I began speaking.

In this informal, educational, and enjoyable session, I will offer lessons learned from a lifetime of talking. I will share, and we will discuss (among other things):

Why – I began speaking at conferences, and why you might, too
What – topics I select, and which might work for you
How – I create a talk, and how you develop ideas

Come prepared to ask and answer questions as we collaboratively converse, and “talk about talking!”

View Damian’s presentation here.

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User Stories in a Waterfall World: When a large cross-functional project is running waterfall, but your team is agile

The 13th Annual State of AgileTM Report produced by CollabNet VersionOne shows that most organizations are still maturing on their Agile Journey with 78% of respondents stating that not all of their organization’s teams are agile. Moreover, Waterfall remains the predominant methodology on large cross-functional programs. 

In this session, we will explore how hybrid approaches commonly mix Waterfall and Agile approaches, and where the challenges generally remain.  We will also discuss how to leverage story mapping and user stories to assist the whole program in remaining focused on the end user.

View Samantha’s presentation here.

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Mission to Mars: An Agile Adventure

Work Together to Launch a Rocket to Mars!
This innovative board game challenges players to build and launch a rocket to Mars. Players form Agile teams, collaborating through “Sprints” to complete important tasks. The game tracks each team's score, along with other metrics used in Agile, such as “Velocity”. In order to win the game and successfully launch your rocket, your team will have to demonstrate characteristics of actual successful Agile teams.

How does the game facilitation work?
Players are split into teams at the start of the game (4 players per team). Large scale facilitation can work up to 48 people. Your team's goal is to build your rocket and successfully launch it to Mars. To do this your team will need to work together through multiple Sprints in an Agile environment. At the beginning of the game your team will be contracted by a company, each with different objectives and focuses. Next, each team member will pick one character card based on their skills. These skills will determine how effective players are at completing tasks. It is important to work together to pick a balanced team that aligns with company goals. The game operates best in a 1.5 hour block, but can be run in shorter (no less than 1 hour) or longer (no more than 4 hour) sessions.

Game Content 
All materials, including, but not limited to, the game board, PowerPoint slides and hand out materials remain the exclusive property of ASPE. This material may not be duplicated in any manner without the express written permission of ASPE. The client agrees not to contract directly with the ASPE facilitator for the presentation of this game or future course topics.

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Develop yourself and uplift others

In the constant flux of software development, everyone involved in creating new technologies and features must adapt to changes or be left behind. One obstacle facing professional development is lack of support and/or guidance from management. According to a recent survey by Robert Half Finance & Accounting, only 26% of employers allow their employees to attend continuing professional education courses during business hours. However, all is not lost: change can come from within rather than management. Employees can take the reins of continuous improvement and generate positive change for themselves & their organization. In this session, the audience will learn how to implement a robust continuous improvement curriculum that can be integrated into an organization's culture -- one training class, one conference, one professional group at a time.

View Thomas’s presentation here.

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stop talking, start building - trust, it’s time!

Where do you stand? Do you just walk in a room and trust everyone? Or, are you a healthy skeptic and you start at a zero trust position?

We talk about trust a lot with regards to adopting agile and Scrum practices. We talk about having courage, taking risks, and learning from failure. This is really easy to say, and hard to do in some environments -- trust may be damaged or doesn't exist at all.

Attend this session if you want to learn the mind science of trust, a look at the impact of trust on the Scrum team, and talk about a framework to assess and actively address building trust.

View Matt’s presentation here.

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Business Analysis for Leaders

An overview of educating an organization on the value of business analysis and insights on building a business analysis team to deliver that value. What we will discuss:

• Evangelizing Business Analysis

  • Be a BA Champion

  • Educating the Organization

  • Leveraging Resources

• Focusing the BA Team

  • Relationships

  • The Goal

  • Build the Process

  • Trusting the Process

• Wrap-up

  • Summary

Q & A

View John’s presentation here.

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How I handled a difficult conversation and survived to tell the tale!

How often do you have a conversation and walk away frustrated or feel like you said or did something you didn’t mean? You likely encountered a crucial conversation and didn’t realize it! The book “Crucial Conversations – Tools for Talking When Stakes are High” discusses seven principles to facilitate having healthy dialogue and getting results. Based on my personal experiences with using the tools and techniques discussed in this book, we will discuss what constitutes a crucial conversation, how we respond to them and why, how would we prefer to respond to them, and how can you move to action and results with others. Attendees will be involved in 2 activities during this session: 1) one activity will help individual attendees learn more about their style under stress during crucial conversations and 2) one activity will apply one of the concepts to a real scenario that the attendee may be facing on their team. Attendees are encouraged to bring one scenario to use for the purpose of discussion.

View Melissa’s presentation here.

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Mock-Ups for mobile

Recently, Franklin University made a big push to give students mobile access to functionality that was previously unavailable or only available on a desktop. Over the past year, we have developed and refined a mobile app for students called the Franklin Gateway. This was a collaborative effort that spanned many departments and many skill sets. In this talk, I will give specific examples of how we developed mock-ups, performed user testing on mock-ups, and refined our requirements using mock-ups. The key takeaways from attending this talk will be:

- How to get started on an epic initiative using mock-ups
- Using mock-ups to define MVP, prioritize and refine requirements
- Tools for building mock-ups, sharing, and getting feedback
- Crafting surveys for usability
- Important considerations for mobile design
- Bringing desktop functionality to mobile

View Paul’s presentation here.

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impact mapping

Is your organization moving to a business outcome delivery model? Are you making it visual with Impact Mapping? Impact mapping is a visual strategic planning technique that will empower teams to have laser focus on delivering business value. Impact maps help teams do their best work by clearly communicating assumptions, aligning efforts to business outcomes using a series of metrics and milestones to gauge progress towards product road map success. Impact mapping helps realize outcomes in an efficient cost-effective way. Come learn how to get your teams started with Impact Mapping.

View Jennifer’s presentation here.

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Off the Happy Path: Looking at Requirements from a Tester’s Point of View

Let’s face it, there are more things that you want the application NOT to do then to do. As a tester, it’s my job to figure out how to gain access to all the unmarked paths surrounding the happy path and locate gaps in requirements and not forget those pesky bugs. 

As the rest of the team focuses on positive requirements and positive paths through the application, I look at all of the negative requirements and negative paths where the gaps and bugs live.  Come explore with me as I share tips on how to create requirements that keep your tester (and users) traveling down the happy path.

View Cindy’s presentation here.

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Managing Fear to Keep the Project on Track

BA's are at the center of an organization's People, Processes, and Technology. So when the processes are well designed and the tech works, why might your project still be at risk? Answer: People! Find out how to manage through people's fears to stay on track. We'll look specifically at fear of change. Where does it come from and how can we coach people through it?

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