Who or what helps you solve unsolvable issues? Whose opinions do you seek to resolve questions like: where should an analyst grow? Will AI replace analysts? What to do if you're tired of routine? How to solve unsolvable problems? How to motivate yourself?

You can endlessly listen to opinion leaders and look for reliable and proven solutions. But do you really want to follow in someone else's footsteps and directions?

A proven way to find your path and self-actualize according to your values is through the use of conceptual thinking.

It will help you to see any situation from the height, from the depth, and at any angle. With it, you will find truly correct answers for yourself and solutions to “unsolvable” situations — both in work and in life. It will give you the necessary courage, audacity, and kick you out.

This concludes the motivational part. Come to the presentation to find out:

• why conceptual thinking is needed;
• how to apply it in work;
• how to check your level;
• how to enhance it.

The development of the digital economy demands highly qualified IT professionals. There is a shortage of such personnel in Russia despite the growth of educational programs. The departure of Western vendors and certification systems has complicated the verification of IT skills, especially for newcomers. Russian IT professional certification, including systems analysts, offers a solution. 

During the roundtable discussion, we will address: 

• The benefits of certification for engineers: testers, developers, analysts, and product owners. 
• Why certification is essential for companies. 
• How HR specialists can utilize certifications. 
• The certification process itself. 
• The evolution of certification. 

IBS Training Center employees and representatives of the expert community of analysts will cover these topics.

How to measure KPIs for analysts in the midst of our multitasking, complex workload forecasting, constant changes, and endless dependencies on others?

As an analyst and a team leader responsible for the collective outcome of the team's work, I present to you the talk "Practical Approaches to Measuring Analyst KPIs in Agile Projects." In this presentation, we will explore how to extract objective and valuable performance data of analysts in real numbers without hindering the team's work.

This talk will be of interest to analysts and managers who prioritize delivering high-quality work within tight timeframes. We will examine the theory, uncover the challenges of its application, discuss examples of useful KPIs, explore the difficulties involved in their implementation, and assess whether the game is worth the candle. As a result, you will receive a step-by-step algorithm for identifying and shaping key performance indicators.

Who has ever been wondering, whether we are really effective, doing the things we really need? What is more important: Doing the right things or Doing the things right?

Some of these questions are being solved for us in companies with high level of business process maturity: we can expect to get there clearly defined goals, effectiveness and productiveness indicators. The only thing we should do there – is to find the “our” place in this environment.

But what would you do at the time of global uncertainty when everything is chaos and business processes are just at the lowest level. How to understand that your actions are really valuable? And how to identify whether the opportunities and tasks offered to you by other do really make sense for your own?

Let’s review these questions systematically and try apply the prosed approach to defining your own effectiveness. We’ll try to review complex approach in simple forms and make it interactive

Why some managers get passed tasks back qualitatively done in time, while others have to do everything themselves? And why, at the end of the day, someone agrees to perform “the other's job”?

 

Delegation is one of the key tool of leadership, effectiveness, motivation and professional development. Treating delegation as a shared side of these aspects is an essential basement of productive developing culture. However, try to find some qualitative information on this topic.

 

Even if you attempt to google it, you'll probably spot a well-known Eisenhower matrix or just some plain lists like “what tasks to delegate and what not to”. 

 

In the scope of this talk, we'll endeavour to analyse the delegation topic in a nutshell. We'll consider how to select proper methods and approaches for effective delegation. We'll touch such topics as leadership and management, effectiveness and motivation, professional development and relations with reference to examples from analysts work.

Have you noticed that we understand the BA role quite differently? Our daily work, its quality, our activities and even communication circles hardly depend on it. If lacking comprehensive information, we are forming wrong expectations, which lead to disappointments and conflicts.
Which actually might be easily avoided.
Within this talk, we will learn how to define expectations on BA work in different situations. We'll consider a few cases with opposite setups (different project phases, processes, teams) and determine how BA roles may drastically differentiate. We'll see how this impacts the feedback on our work. We'll define which aspects should be clarified first when discovering mutual expectations on BA work and project. As a result, we'll come up with an adaptive approach for BA operating model definition.
Just half an hour or your time will save you kilometres of nerve cells.
Come up and don't forget to take your mobile gadgets with you. Let's interact!

Have you ever faced such a situation when unpredicted circumstances totally change project direction? Is it your case, when project risk-management tools have been used very formally and really don't make sense in the prevention of potential problems? 

I suggest you take part in this interactive presentation. We'll consider a project case full of uncertainty and hazards. Every participant may take part in forming a common vision of reasonable risk-log, just using a smartphone for anonymous and autonomous voting. We'll go through the main stages of risk management, turning conscious and unconscious fears and phobias into measurable risks with mitigation plans.

And the main bonus: the demonstrated and tested approach is reusable and easily adaptable for different project setups and cases!

NB! Please take your smartphones! (it will be convenient even for introverts)

The author proposes to consider the challenges faced by Business Analysts in IT and product companies as a valuable part of BAs career path. Such obstacles block BAs from effective work. And the key question here is how to accelerate self-development working properly and moving from operational to tactic and strategic levels.

Keeping BA hard skills out of scope for this talk, the author presents a systematic overview of professional challenges which Business Analyst deal with on his way from requirement engineering to collaboration with C-level Customer representatives.

Additionally, the author provides Service IT-companies capabilities for such over-professional development.

Have you ever had to improve your BA skills in a short period of time? Reading books, searching for best practices via the Internet, listening to podcasts, participating in conferences, investigating BABOK and getting certificates - those are good ways to get some knowledge. But before any knowledge turns into practical skills you need some real practice.  

How many years do you need to turn the knowledge of the 50 BABOK techniques into practical skills?

To be honest, this is not a unique problem. The need for self-development appears regularly. We constantly want to improve our competences. Our colleagues need us to help them grow.

In fact, we’re dealing with a bold challenge which has led us to develop our own approach which has already helped a large number of BAs. Just come to the session to hear about our way and to share your thoughts and ideas. And together we can make this problem a bit less complicated.

See you!

There are no ready solutions when working with complications. Also, there is no appropriate framework for complex projects.

The author aim is creating a basic approach to deal with non-standard situations and looking for patterns in solving complex problems in the business analyst responsibility area.

 

Within the talk, we will try to systemize project complications, identify their causes and effects, and define in what degree a business analyst may impact them. We will also discuss the suggested approach of cases analysis and try to apply it to different situations.

Within this presentation we are going to discuss User stories specifics which appears in large projects delivered via few releases and implemented by few teams. We will discuss such questions as: what are the challenges that BA faces with on her way to archive an optimal Story; which factors should be taken into consideration when defining the approach; what can a regular BA do for that and whether she really should do it; who will evaluate her efforts (at least if it will be ever evaluated).

A real case from large, long and possibly overly agile project is at the heart of presentation. You will see how challenges may affect the approach and develop BA-creation. For sure we will consider the prospects  from BABOK and other guides, as well as some conclusions made with our colleagues, which helped us to drive these interesting exciting challenges.

There is an attempt to define the applicability of Customer engagement approach into project development. On the negative example of a large project, we will consider pros & cons of different approaches to collaboration with a customer. The scale and duration of the project let the author a possibility to track the dynamic and evaluate customer engagement influence to a project success. While searching solution we will make methodology base analysis on BABOK chapter’ example. Undiscovered and white areas of customer engagement practical perspectives have seemed as a good perspective of the report.