Celebrating IIBA and our 10th Anniversary: A Look Back and Our Vision for the Future Alain Arseneault and Team Tuesday, November 19, 2013 Public Webinar Maureen:
Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining the International Institute of Business Analysis, celebrating our 10th anniversary. We’re going to be looking back at the accomplishments of the Business Analysis community and forward to the future. Thank you for joining us this evening, this afternoon and today, no matter where you are in the world. I’m Maureen McVey, the Head of Learning and Development, and your host for this evening. I will be monitoring questions and will be asking them of the panelists at the end of our session. It’s my pleasure to introduce to you our Acting President and CEO, Alain Arseneault. Welcome Alain, and welcome to everyone else.
Alain:
Welcome. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today, or tonight as Maureen indicated earlier, depending where you are on the planet. I know there are also several chapters that are celebrating with us at this moment, so I would like to welcome you all as well. With me on this webinar we have Indy Mitra who is the Chair of the Board of Directors, Kitty Hass our Vice Chair, Dave Bieg our Chief Operating Officer, Michael Gladstone our Chief Information Officer and Kevin Brennan our Chief Business Analyst. The purpose of this webinar is really to celebrate our 10 year anniversary and to take at a high level a look back at the last 10 years. We’ll speak to key milestones and our panel members will also share their experiences and personal stories. We’ll wrap this with a brief overview of the road ahead. Maureen, if you could change slides. Thank you. We would like to thank all of the volunteers for their commitment and hard work for the
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ongoing success of this organization. Thank you to our staff, our champions, our advocates, our subject matter experts, authors, volunteers and other stake holders in the BA community, that has made Business Analysis what it is today, and helped form this organization. Thank you all for your contributions. Without your outstanding efforts we wouldn’t be here today celebrating. As you can see we are close to 28,000 members with approximately 1,500 volunteers. I was corrected today, that we have now 110 chapters. The United Arab Emirates joined our chapter community last week. Thank you for being part of this organization. Let’s take a brief look at the last 10 years. I will now ask Dave Bieg to provide us with a brief overview of key milestones from the last 10 years. Dave, feel free to share your personal experiences or stories as you go through this. Thank you. Dave:
Thank you, Alain, and welcome everyone. It’s a pleasure for me to be here tonight sharing with you some of our past accomplishments. We will start off by talking about the very beginnings which occurred on October 29, 2003 in Toronto, Canada with basically 28 participants from 21 different organizations. Ultimately that was the culmination of the inaugural meeting of what has become the International Institute of Business Analysis. In 2004 we had our first firsts. The first of those firsts was the AGM followed by the fact that we signed up our first chapter. Congratulations to Winnipeg for being that first chapter and for sticking with us through thick and thin. In 2005, we introduced the Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge version one. As all of you are eagerly waiting, version three is in the works. We hope to be delivering that to you in about a year, so stay tuned for that. We can’t forget version one. It was an absolutely huge accomplishment and a huge step forward for the organization and for the profession of Business Analysis. Thank you to all who contributed to version one, version 1.6, version two and now all of the volunteers who are participating in version three. On this next slide we are talking about 2006, and 2006 is actually my anniversary because 2006 is actually when I became involved with IIBA. Before I go through the list of accomplishments, I have a personal story that I’ll share with everyone that I thought was rather comical at the time.
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I came on-board about midway through the year. I had actually lost the election to become a member of the board. Of course, that didn’t last very long because within a few short months I was actually on the board. Nevertheless, I came on board as the Chief Operating Officer. I went to my first meeting, I believe, in August of that year. All of the board members were in attendance at that point in time and I got to meet everyone. We started off with the agenda and I asked if I could ask a question. Certainly everyone said, “Yes, absolutely ask a question.” I said, “As the Chief Operating Officer, I’d like to get a copy of the budget.” The response was, “Budget? What budget?” Basically, that was how things started for me. We didn’t have a budget when I joined, but by the end of the year we definitely had a budget in place. We knew how much money we had, and we knew the fact that we had just about 1,500 members. That was the beginning of great things to come. I’m going to cover some those as I go through here. Also in 2006, we welcomed our first chapter outside of North America. We also offered our first CBAP examination. That was in the November time period, and we started the Endorsed Education Provider Program. As a result of everyone who took the first CBAP exam, in 2007 we were able to award our first CBAP recipients, which was a huge milestone for the organization and for the profession. In 2008 we launched our webinar series. You heard Tracy talk about the fact that we’ve got a whole archive of webinars with various topics. As members you should be taking advantage of those webinars in the archives. We also moved the CBAP exams to a computer-based format. That, again, was another huge step forward for us. Next slide please. Very quickly, by 2009, three short years later we were at 10,000 members. Pretty incredible. We released version two of the BABOK Guide. First of all, this was a really a defining moment for us because it was such a major leap forward from version one. In 2010, we introduced two new membership programs. The first being the Global Membership Program, which offered parody to every nation across the globe. That has been a huge success for us in terms of being able to attract members from around the globe. That was a really great thing for us to achieve. We also launched our Corporate Membership Program, which has now grown to over 200 corporate members. We also had the first IIBA
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conference. I’m sure there are a number of you on the phone that remember that conference. All I can say is we have come a very long way from that first conference in a little dinky hotel in Washington, DC to Mandalay Bay in 2013 just a week ago. In 2011 we introduced the Competency Model. We also introduced our second certification, CCBA. Next slide please. That brings us almost up to date. Last year we achieved 25,000 members. We also introduced our Academic Recognition Programs. This year we have quite a few accomplishments. First of all, we made our Business Analysis Competency Assessment available for mid to senior level BAs. We also developed a Career Roadmap. We introduced the Agile Extension to the BABOK Guide. Speaking of the BABOK Guide, we released our Spanish and German translation. For the CBAP, we translated the CBAP exam into both Japanese and German. Lastly, I mentioned BBC last week in Mandalay Bay where we had over 1,400 attendees and over 500 IIBA members in attendance. It was a great event. I hope that all of you, if you haven’t been to a BBC, you will give it strong consideration for next year. We look forward to seeing you there. Now I would like to hand over the baton to Indy Mitra. Alain:
Actually Dave, I’m just going to take this again. I want to congratulate Indy because Indy has been a volunteer at our organization since day one. This is a great accomplishment to celebrate with Indy today as well. Indy, if you could share your experience. You’ve been with us for so long. I’m sure that you have great stories to tell. Tell us why you joined the organization and some of your stories. Thank you.
Indy:
Sure. I am happy to do so. Thank you for inviting me to speak today and thank you to everyone who is on the line listening wherever you are in the world. [reference point 0:10:00] It amazes me. I’m sitting in my room, in my office at home and I’m speaking to I don’t know how many people around the world. It’s absolutely fantastic.
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I became a Business Analyst in 1986. I was hired as a Senior Business Analyst actually and we did some process modeling and data modeling. It was very, very preliminary stages of the world of the Business Analyst as it is today. I worked in that kind of role for about 10 years or so. In 1997 I joined the Bank of Montreal. I got to Bank of Montreal and had been in various other banks in Canada. Bank of Montreal is one of the five largest banks, and I had worked in a couple of others, and they had Business Analysts. When I got to Bank of Montreal, they didn’t have Business Analysts. They had no Business Analysts. I remember sitting there being mystified, thinking “How can you do systems development without requirements? What are you actually building here?” It was only about three years later that I met Kathleen Barrett. Kathleen Barrett said, “I’ve been hired to bring in a Business Analysis Center of Competency to the Bank of Montreal.” I said, “Yes, alright finally someone is recognizing Business Analysis.” In 2003, Maureen McVey invited me to this meeting that was going to be held at the big meeting center that the Bank of Montreal has. I walked into this room and I thought, “Who the heck is going to go to this meeting? Why would anyone want to go to this meeting?” I felt the Business Analyst wasn’t getting the recognition it needed in the world. There were lots of organizations that had Business Analysts. Bank of Montreal finally had a few, and had a Center of Competency because Kathleen had actually built that. I walked into the room and there were 28 people in the room. I was absolutely blown away by the passion and enthusiasm of the people in the room. I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, “Who are all of these people?” I had no idea who many of these people were. I knew a couple of them because they worked at Bank of Montreal. A gentleman named Jessie Hansvol, who isn’t at BMO any more, got up there and said, “You know what? We can beat PMI. We can be the Business Analysis go to professional association, and we will do that within five years what took PMI about 50 years to get to.” I was thinking, “Yes, this sounds really great.” Kathleen got up there and talked a little bit about her experience building the Center of Competency. Everyone was very excited. We thought, “Yes, we’re definitely going to create this organization.”
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This list of names here, these are the names of the people who were in the room with me. I can count on my hand how many of these people are still involved with IIBA, either as a volunteer or as a member, a staff member and that kind of thing. Then there are a couple that have moved along, but that’s because of their own personal reasons. The best part of that meeting was the part where we named the association. We sat down and we said, “Okay, we’re going to create our organization. We want it to have a working title.” We wanted to be a collection of Business Analysis professionals. We wanted to listen to one another. We wanted to know how to brainstorm. “We value consensus and basically, we’re a group of facilitators.” That was agreed to. We then had a big discussion about Business Analysis, Business Analysts and a whole bunch of other things like that. What about those Business Analysts who actually crunch spreadsheets and do all these data analysis type stuff? There was a big conversation around that. Maureen, you might remember this, but we had a 20 minute discussion about the name. We knew we wanted to be international. We knew we wanted to have Business Analysis in the title. We knew we wanted to be a professional institution. We had ‘International Institute’ and it was ‘International Institute for Business Analysis’, ‘International Institute of Business Analysis’, and ‘International Institute for Business Analysts’. We sat there for 20 minutes and debated the merits of ‘of’ and ‘for’. No word of a lie, this was a very heated conversation. You had a bunch of Business Analysts in the room trying to come to consensus over a simple word like ‘of’ or ‘for’. It was quite hilarious when I think back to it. We created working committees. We decided Kathleen would be our President. We had a list of potential volunteers. There were about 30 people. We created these committees. We had Marketing, Special Events, Membership and Government. These four groups went off and did their thing to get us to the point of where we are today. The Governance group worked toward having our first AGM, as Dave mentioned, in 2004. That was very interesting because there were all of these rules I had to follow. We had lawyers involved in terms of, how do you become a corporation, how do you create your organization, and that sort of thing.
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It was interesting because we had a meeting, then people had to join and then we could have our first AGM. It was actually kind of a protractive kind of conversation. I had learned about Robert’s Rules of Order, of which I had never heard of prior to all of this. It was kind of fun. Kathleen of course, was the spirit and the little whirling dervish in the middle of all of this. She spent a lot of time basically hooking people along. Many people got involved in IIBA because of Kathleen’s tenacity and her joyous respect for the volunteer. That definitely informed IIBA for many, many years. That’s basically how I got involved. Starting in 1986, it was a 26 or 25 year road to where we are today. Business Analysts are now probably one of the hottest commodities in the marketplace. We have, hopefully will become and will continue to be the professional association for business analysis, and we will be the institute of business analysis for the world. I am thrilled to be here today. Thank you so much. Alain:
Thank you so much Indy. What a great testimonial. It’s fantastic to hear you tell your story. I’ve heard little bits and parts in the past, but it was wonderful to be listening to you again, so thank you.
Indy:
Well, I’m happy to be here. Thank you.
Alain:
I would like to ask Kitty Hass to do the same thing. Kitty has also been with us for many years. I’m sorry Kitty, I don’t remember exactly how many, but you probably can tell us. Also, tell us why you joined the organization, what you’ve been doing and again, if you have some personal stories that you’d like to share that would be wonderful.
Kitty:
Thank you Alain. I am honored to be invited to participate in this, and in meetings. You can see, I’ve been involved in IIBA for a long time. I started as a member of the BABOK committee developing version two. That’s when I first met Kevin and Brenda. Brenda Kerton was chairing the committee. Kevin was a committee member, then he assumed the Chair of the committee. We worked diligently as an internet, virtual committee trying to pull together the next version of the BABOK Guide. Since then, you see different opportunities I have had and role I have filled. Probably the most gratifying role was when I chaired Chapter Council. I got to meet a whole lot of chapter leadership teams and a whole lot of members.
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Now I serve on the Board Nomination Committee and as Vice Chair helping Alain and Indy move us forward. Why did I become interested in IIBA? I’m an IT person from way back and it drove me absolutely crazy that we couldn’t deliver on projects any better than we did. We didn’t seem to be on time or on budget, or on scope. We didn’t even know about or measure the value of project solutions. I really felt that Business Analysis was going to fill the gap in our business practices, between developing strategy and executing strategy. I am so happy to be here for the next part of our journey. [reference point 0:20:00] I think Kathleen and her team did an amazing job. It was so nice to observe her, how she brought the organization from a small volunteer organization into a very dynamic professional association, but now we need to move forward. We need to be a real player in the 21st century. Things are changing so rapidly. I am thrilled to be on the board while we traverse this critical juncture. BAs are critical to our project success, to identify and manage business requirements. We’re going to be called upon to do a whole lot more in the next decade. We’re going to be called upon to be more strategic, as Kevin and Alain will talk about in a few minutes, to be innovative, creative, to understand [inaudible 0:21:00]. Once again, IIBA is about inventing and reinventing the role of the Business Analyst. Again, I am so happy to be a part of this journey. I’m so happy that I’ve met a whole bunch of you guys at meetings and conferences. I just want to say you are so important to us. Without you we wouldn’t have an organization. We wouldn’t have feedback. We wouldn’t know which direction we should be moving in. Welcome to all of you, and stay with us for this next 10 years. Thanks a lot.
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Alain:
Thank you so much Kitty. I really appreciate your feedback and insight. Let’s move on with Michael Gladstone who is our Chief Information Officer. He also started as a volunteer, so Michael if you could please do the same and share your experience and stories.
Michael:
Great. Thanks for that and thanks everyone for celebrating with us. It is great to be here.
One thing I did want to mention off the top, I actually heard about IIBA I guess relatively shortly after its founding. Sometime in 2004 or early 2005, I remember I was sitting at my desk. A collegue of mine came up to me and she told me that there was this entity called IIBA and that it was really out there to support Business Analysts. Both she and I were BAs at the time. She strongly encouraged me to get involved, volunteer, sign up as a member and things like that. I don’t quite know if I said it out loud or not, but the one thing I remember thinking was, “An organization like that must be a group of BA fanatics of some kind and certainly not the type of organization that I would mesh well with.” Some number of years later, I think that’s still true. It is a group of fanatics, but I’m one of them now. Even though, as Kitty was saying, that there’s so much great stuff that we’ve done and so much more to do. It really is an incredible opportunity to be involved. For all of you who are volunteers, thank you. For all of you who have thought of volunteering, but haven’t taken the leap, I strongly encourage you to do so. As it notes here, I got involved in IIBA in 2006. Essentially, I met Kathleen for the first time. To put it lightly, she strongly encouraged me to get involved in IIBA when she found out that I wasn’t. In fact, shortly thereafter within days I had signed up to be a member of the organization and really took the leap into real volunteering for the first time. I had been working as a BA for a number of years and really felt that certification was something that was really important to me. Other professions out there, whether it’s accountants, engineers or PMs and so on, have their professional certifications. It really was important to me to become professionally certified. I had spent time over a couple of years at that point looking for a professional certification that would fit me in my BA role, and not surprisingly, there really weren’t any. When I got involved in IIBA and found out that the organization was looking to build a BA certification, the light came on and I jumped at the opportunity to get involved, so I put my hand up. The first position that I was offered was as the Volunteer Chair of what at the time was a Certification Committee. Essentially the committee and I spent time over the course of 2006 working to launch the CBAP designation. We were looking to put all of the things we needed to
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together in order to enable people to apply for the certification and sit for the exam at the end of the year, as Dave was talking about earlier. As noted here, and Dave touched on earlier, that first exam was with 16 people, held in Orlando in November of 2006. As a committee, it was really exciting and terrifying at the same time. Obviously, the excitement was natural. The terror was in two ways. One way being that we were just scared about what we were building. Was it good, or was it not good? Obviously, none of us had ever built a professional certification before. The other part was that, the actual entire application process was paperbased. When I mean ‘paper-based’, we got all of the applications on paper and we were trying to figure out how we were going to go through and assess these applications and so on. For those of you who have either applied for certification or checked it out, you know that it is pretty expensive. When it was on paper it was different, but it was also just as expensive. Figuring out a way to go through all those applications on paper was quite an endeavor in its own right. Fast forward a little bit, as Dave mentioned earlier, the launch of CCBA in early 2011 was another milestone for the organization. CBAP had been launched targeting the senior members of the profession. Something that was very important for us was to create a designation that was really achievable by the vast majority of BAs within the industry. That’s really what CCBA was built for. We still strongly encourage anyone who is at that point in their careers to take advantage of the opportunity to seek CCBA certification rather than potentially holding out and taking CBAP at some later date solely. We have had significant interest, especially relatively recently, from the corporate members. Dave mentioned we now have over 200 corporate members. A good number of them have looked at certification, either in the immediate term, in terms of encouraging their staff to become certified, or from the perspective of, “You know what? Our staff is not quite there yet, but certification is a long-term goal for us for our staff and we want to work with IIBA to ensure that our staff gets the training that they need in order to seek certification at some point later on.” Paper for the most part is long gone. Our applications are available online. A big change there and over the next year we will be working to
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rid ourselves and everyone else of the last remnants of our manual processes, so watch for that as well. As noted here, and as Dave mentioned earlier, this year was a big year for us in launching CBAP in both Japanese and German. In addition, last year we did launch the CCBA exam in both Japanese as well. It has been a great couple of years in terms of expanding our certification products internationally, and translating them. One last anecdote that I did want to pass along. Back before we launched computer-based exams, essentially the way it worked is we would work with either a chapter or a conference producer to host a paper-based exam with the chapter or at the conference. From a pricing perspective, the only way to make it work was if we had a minimum number of people actually sitting to right the exam. The only way we could do that was to literally beg the chapters to encourage their chapter members to apply for certification and sit for the exam. [reference point 0:30:00] Suzanne Bertschi who is our Certification Product Manager, she and I were talking about this the other day. We were just reminiscing back on those years where we were literally on the phone begging chapters to try to get their people out so that we would have enough people to sit for an exam. Obviously, the most computer-based testing changed that significantly, and for the better. With that, Alain, I’ll turn it back to you. Alain:
Thank you so much Michael, some great insights from your perspective, so thanks. Now let’s move on the Kevin Brennan, our Chief Business Analyst and lecturist on panel. Kevin also started as a volunteer, but I’ll let Kevin tell his story as well.
Kevin:
I got involved in IIBA because one of my friends, Jim Baird, was at that first inaugural meeting. A couple of weeks later he and I went out for drinks and he told me about this association that was starting up. He suggested very strongly that I should get involved. I thought about it for a while, gave it a bit of thought and I said I’d probably want to get involved in either certification or working on the body of knowledge. Jim said, “Oh, no problem with certification. Everyone is going to want to do that.”
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That’s what I decided to try and do. As it happened, when we began we didn’t have a body of knowledge yet and we had a few other things to do first. I spent about a year working with the membership committee before the BOK committee got off the ground. As soon as I heard that it was in place, I sent Brenda Kerton, who is now on our Board of Directors, an email asking if I could join. We took off that committee back in October of 2004. That says how long we’ve been working on all of these things. Over the next two years, we took the BOK from nothing to version 1.6, which released in June of 2006. That took us from nowhere to, I think a couple of hundred pages of content on Business Analysis. At that point Brenda decided that it was time for her to step down the Chair of the committee, although she did stay involved for quite a while. Then we regrouped and decided it was time to rebuild the body of knowledge from the ground up. We’ve learned so much from what we’ve done, so much from the work we’ve done, but we really needed to make it so much more consistent and coherent and pull it all together. The version two team, which included Brenda, as well as Kitty Hass, Mary Gorman, Barb Carkenord, who was one of the original members of the committee, along with myself and Brenda, EizabethLarson , and so many others. We all worked together to build that body of knowledge and get it to where it is today. Those of you who studied the BOK, I hope haven’t noticed, but the final edits and layout of the BOK were done late at night right after my daughter was born. I tried to avoid letting any of the sleep deprivation creep in, but it might be there. Version two has been successful beyond our imaginations. We have sold tens of thousands of copies and should be tens of thousands more for our membership. We have translations now in five different languages— Japanese, German, Spanish, Portuguese and French. We’ve had volunteers coming to us from across the world asking to help spread the word and get BOK into their languages as well. It has been an amazing journey and I’ve really liked seeing how the BA community has embraced this publication.
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This year, we actually released our first extension to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, the Agile Extension. That was developed in partnership with the Agile Alliance, a non-profit focused on spreading word about Agile methodologies. It has been a long ride and we still have quite a lot of work to do. Let’s go on to the next slide. Alain:
Let me introduce this topic. We talked a lot about the last 10 years, and just want to spend a few more minutes again, and take a look at the role that had virtually on BABOK Three. That’s why Kevin said to go on to the next slide. I would like to ask Kevin to provide us a little bit of an insight into the work that we’re doing on BABOK Three, and also Kevin has presented a wonderful presentation at the BBC conference on the future of Business analysis and I’d like him to speak on to that as well. Once Kevin is done, I’ll tell you a few more things about its vision and its future.
Kevin:
Thank you, Alain. As Alain mentioned, we are currently working on version three of the Body of Knowledge. That’s been chaired by Laura Patton, who has helped us as a Product Project Manager on version two. She’s been working with a group of volunteers from around the world to help define and build that BOK. With version two, all of the leads were North America. [technical difficulties 0:36:23 – 0:37:36]
Kevin:
I’m not sure where you actually lost me, but I was just saying that we’ve had a team working on version three from around the world. People from every continent have been involved in it, and over 100 volunteers, maybe even closer to 200 have been hands on with version three to date. Right now, we have completed the in-house review, the practitioner and expert review of version three. They gave us a lot of comments. We had over 3,000 comments submitted by various practitioners and experts on the initial draft. The team is working to incorporate all of that feedback, all of that information and insight into what will ultimately be the public release early next year. I won’t get too specific because the project manager might hurt me, but it didn’t have it out there. It will be released for everyone out the in the world, anyone whether an IIBA member or not, it will be in existence to provide us with feedback and commentary and their thoughts on the direction of version three.
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We will look at every single comment that’s sent to us. We will assess every single comment that is submitted to us, and all of that will be incorporated into the final published version, which we expect to come out late next year. Since I always get asked these questions immediately afterwards, our certification exams will remain based on version two until at least six months after the release of version three. Version three is going to include a lot of new information. We’ve updated the various tasks throughout the BOK. We’ve actually streamlined and simplified the structure somewhat, so there are a couple of less tasks in version three than there were in version two. We’ve added a bunch of new techniques that have grown in prominence, but one of the big additions is the inclusion of what we’re calling perspectives. Version two took a sort of generalist approach to Business Analysis, focusing on IT projects with some look at BPM and some looks at Agile Development. [reference point 0:40:00] With version three, we’ve really tried to build on that. Version three will include chapters on iterative and waterfall IT projects, but also on Agile Development, Business Process Management, on Business Architecture and on Business Intelligence. We’re including those things to help prepare BAs for the future that we see ahead of them. This additional content is going to, of course, increase the size of the BOK. We’re still assessing exactly all of that material will be reflected in the certification exams. The goal here is really to make the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge something that will be useful to you in the years to come, so that if you are a BA working in one of those fields and you’re interested in moving into another one, you can quite easily see what’s different, what’s the same. You can also see what you may need to learn and improve, what new techniques you may need to add, and also what techniques you know today that would be useful in this new environment. With that, I think we can move on to the next slide.
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Alain:
Kevin, we have about 20 minutes left on the webinar. I don’t want to rush you, but I have a few more things to do and I want to make sure we leave time for questions and comments from our members.
Kevin:
No problem, Alain. I’ll keep it short.
What we are trying to do here is to prepare for the future of our profession. We’ve seen across the board that Business Analysis is changing. The introduction of new methodology such as Agile, the development of business process systems and business rule systems. All of these are really contributing to a future where the BA becomes much less focused on software requirements and software development and much more focused on the business need and delivery of business solutions. We still have a lot of work to do in this regard, but we really want to prepare you as professionals for that future. With that, Alain, I’m going to pass the baton back over to you, and ask you to let people know what we’re going to be doing over the next year or two. Alain:
In some of my communication earlier, I spoke about the need for the organization to be more structured, focused and strategic as the Business Analysis marketplace continues to evolve and mature. It is important for IIBA to also respond to the evolving needs of our members, chapters and other stake holders and to be a community. It is really important for us as an organization to think and act more strategically, to be more focused on the critical needs of the organization, and to continue to respond to those at the right pace. We will also do this with a greater engagement of key stake holders. We will engage our chapter leaders, our thought leaders, and other stake holders who are partnering with the IIBA. Kevin was talking about the Agile Alliance. It’s a good example of this. We also intend to establish strategic relationships, partnerships or alliances with other organizations as needed that will enable us to grow the organization, provide value to our members and expand the IIBA ecosystem into areas that are either aligned or complimentary to Business Analysis. Of course, we’ll continue to on operational sustainability to insure the organization is sustainable, insuring that we continue to evolve our technology support and needs, document our processes, manage our bottom-line and insure that we have the right talent in place to help us move through the organization to the next phase of our maturity. The work that started 10 years ago will continue to evolve, and with your participation, the participation of our members, our chapters, our volunteers and key stake holders, we will move the organization in the next decade.
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Next slide please. Before we go on to comments and questions, I want to briefly speak about something we are currently doing to revise our vision, mission and strategic goals. As you know our existing vision statement, mission statement and strategic goals have been established in the early stage of the organization and met the purpose of the organization for the last 10 years. We have reached a 10 year milestone and as I said, the market has evolved and it’s time for us to look at the next 10 years. The next few weeks, we will be establishing a stake holder group with the objective at looking at revising our vision, mission and strategy goal. The group will include representations from chapters, thought leaders, board members and our executive team. Currently we are thinking that these revisions will be made through a facilitative process based on Jim Collins’ visioning framework. We are still in the early stage of planning this. We will communicate more information once we have defined an approach to conduct this work. A result of this work, the executive team will also be leading the revisions of our three-year strategy plan, which will include key initiative for 2014, including as Kevin mentioned, BABOK version three. That’s at the core and most critical of our initiative. It will also be looking at potential revisions to other products that are as part of this system, so the competency model, our certification programs, translation, etc. There are two other key initiatives. I spoke to them in the past, but I want to repeat them. The establishment of a global forum on Business Analysis thought leadership. This forum will help us advance the agenda of the BA profession, act as a key conduit to reach out to the broader BA community as we evolve our standards. It will really leverage the scope of individuals and thought leaders to help us broaden some of the products or services we offer through publication of articles, journals, white papers, etc. Also, the establishment of a chapter’s engagement communication strategy. Kevin, his team and myself, we had a meeting today on this. The purpose of this is to have in place effective communications and engagement activities between IIBA and chapters so that we can have a better way to engage each other and collaborate on the work ahead of us.
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That concludes the core of this webinar. Again, I’d like to thank you all for being here over 10 years with us and counting. Before we go to the next round of comments and questions, Maureen, if you could just change the slide one more time. If you are part of your chapters and you’ve been celebrating or you are celebrating, please share your stories and your pictures with us so that we can put them in our newsletter and share those with our members. Again, send this information to Tracy Cook. Maureen, back to you. Maureen:
Thank you everyone. Thank you, Alain. The stories were great. It was great to hear from Indy and Kitty and our executive Dave, Michael and Kevin. Lots of exciting things have happened in the past. Just a few questions from the audience and a couple of statements. Trevor asks a question and I’ll paraphrase it here, I hope you don’t mind. What do you think the impact of Agile is having on the BA profession? Will the BA role be diminished? Kevin, because you worked on the Agile Extension, perhaps you might want to answer that question.
Kevin:
Sure, I’ll be happy to. I don’t think it will be diminished, but I do think it will change. I think the biggest change is that, in the Agile environment we focus much less on writing software requirements. For Agile to work, the development team needs to know exactly what it is they are supposed to be building, right? How many of us have actually worked in organizations where we have a business user who can tell us exactly what they want at any given moment, who can figure out what the priorities are, who can give you in detail how the process works? In reality we know that whenever we talk to stake holders we get 17 stake holders we get one answer per stake holder or sometimes the take holders give two different answers to the same question. You’re still going to be needed. You’re still going to be doing Business Analysis, but you’re probably going to end up focusing much more on understanding what the business does and what it needs and then helping to develop a team to figure out the solution.
Maureen:
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Thanks Kevin.
Kitty:
Maureen, this is Kitty. Let me add a tiny bit to Kevin’s response. I was meeting with a Pharmaceutical Management group at one point a couple of years ago and they were using Agile. They had a great team. They had budget and approval to work for 12 months. The team even knew after six months that they had met the ROI. They had met the business objective. Because they did not have a BA looking at overall strategic environment, they kept that team tied up for another six months and each release had a marginal return. [reference point 0:50:00] The BA needs to really look at all of the releases, everything that the Agile team is doing and continue to look at the return on investment, the value that’s being delivered. They need to figure out when the Agile team needs to be redirected to something of higher value, rather than continuing to work on revisions, refinements and improvements to the solution that they are currently delivering. It is a very strategic role that the BA will have.
Maureen:
Thank you very much. I think that’s an excellent point. Thanks, Kitty. Well, Ven has a really interesting sort of question statement. It’s a question towards the executive, but I’ll direct it to Dave. Does the IIBA executive think that the current requirements may be hampering the uptake of certification around the world? I’m paraphrasing. This is in comparison to certifications such as the PMP. It seems to be a little slower than that of the uptake of something like the PMP.
Dave:
Sure, I’d be happy to answer. I think, first of all, it’s really important for everyone to understand that when the certification program was put in place, we all agreed from the start as to how we wanted the program to be. Other certification programs have run into problems in regards to people who really weren’t qualified going through the application process, being accepted, taking the exam and passing. We wanted to avoid problems like that. First and foremost, when we constructed the program, we agreed that it wasn’t about the numbers. It was about making sure that the people had the qualifications to sit for the exam and be successful as Business Analysts.
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However, I will also say that, in response to, is there ways that perhaps we could improve the process to make it either more accessible to people or to give the people the opportunity to have a clearer understanding of what’s truly required? The answer to those questions are certainly, yes, we are always looking for ways in which we can improve. To that point we actually had some initiatives underway this year. Some of those initiatives, we are just now getting reports on ways that we could consider making modifications to the program to hopefully remove some of the barriers for some of the people pursuing certification. It’s still a little early to say definitively what we are going to do, but what I can tell you is that we are certainly looking at it. We will consider all of the recommendation that we have received and certainly communicate to our member-base if we do make the choice to actually make some changes to the program. Maureen:
Thanks Dave. That’s very comprehensive and it is continuous improvement as we mature and progress. Ven also has another statement. I’m not sure where he is calling in from, but I assume based on his message that he’s within a small chapter. His statement is that they are finding some challenges finding local testing centers where they are. They have people interested in certification, but there are some challenges for people to get to those testing centers because of the region that they are in. I might throw this out to Dave and Michael, with regard to certification testing centers. I know that we moved to Prometric recently.
Dave:
Yes, at the beginning of 2013, we made the move from our former testing provider to Prometric. With that change we were able to add a lot of new locations, but at the same point in time, some of our prior locations dropped off the list. What I can tell you is that we will work with Prometric to see if there are the opportunities for us to use an alternate testing location, or if Prometric would consider opening a testing location in a given part of the world. As you can well imagine, for Prometric these are business decisions that they have to make. Those business decisions have to be supported by more than just IIBA. It has to be supported by their other customers as well. If that support is not there, then unfortunately we run into a situation where we just can’t
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have a testing center in every single town, village, or city that people live in. The most important thing that I think you can do is certainly let us know. If you’re having any challenges, we’ll work with you to make sure that you’re aware of all of the centers that are in the vicinity of where you live. I can’t say that’s going to be 10 minutes from your house. It’s going to be an hour, an hour and a half, or even two hours away. I think it is incumbent upon us collectively to work together to try to meet your business need in whatever way we possibly can. Maureen:
Thanks very much. There are no other questions. However, are there any other comments or statements by the ELT before we close off today’s session?
Alain:
I would again like to thank the panelists for sharing their stories today and tonight, and thank the participants of this webinar. Thank you for being with us to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. There will be more information coming through you in the next weeks and months on how we are progressing with our initiatives. I’m looking forward to engage again with our members and our chapter leaders to move the organization forward. Thank you all for being here. I really appreciate you coming.
Maureen:
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Yes, thanks to everyone and happy 10th anniversary.
