BBC 2017 Speaker Series – Consultant:  Betsy Stockdale

In anticipation of her presentation at Building Business Capability in Orlando, Nov. 6-10, 2017, we asked Betsy Stockdale, Business Architect at Seilevel, a few questions about transforming the business. Check out this interview in relation to her BBC presentation entitled, It’s an Agile World: Deploying BPM Tools at the Speed of Thought.

Q: In what ways do you help your client organizations handle business transformation?

A: I help my clients handle business transformations by understanding the business goals and objectives, and focusing the solution on achieving those goals and objectives.  This includes understanding the people change management of that transformation, for if that is not considered, the transformation may never happen.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business transformation capabilities for your clients?

A:  The top challenge I continue to have is understanding what current state is in relation to where the clients wants to go.  So many organizations want to skip that step in favor of speed, but that slows us down in the long run.  Best to do it right from the get go!

Q: What are your top suggestions for companies looking to become more agile?

A: You still have to do analysis!  I really don’t care what you call it, be it “Sprint 0”, “Analysis Runway”, “the stuff you do before you start your sprints”, you still have to do a base level of analysis to understand what the objectives are of the effort, and have some idea of the high level scope.  There will still be a lot of iteration and things to figure out and learn, but you still have to have some idea of where you are going.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A:  That business analysis is a global profession, and we all experience the same sort of challenges.  I got to work with a client in Abu Dhabi last year, and while the culture was different, the types of problems and challenges they faced are the same types of problems and challenges my clients face here in the US.  We are a large, global community, and as a profession, we need to continue to support each other.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind?

A: There are many platforms as a service options out there (such as ServiceNow or Appian) that offer low code development environments for building software.  These are terrific options, and they really do speed up the development process.  However, one still has to do the analysis to ensure that what is being built is the right thing to be built.  And “low code” does not mean “no code”.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your client’s business’s operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: Writing requirements using a combination of user story and job story formats.  It really helps my developers understand what the job the persona is trying to get done, and how the software can help them accomplish that job.  Additionally, writing the acceptance criteria in a behavior driven format (Given, When, Then) is also tremendously useful.  It makes me really think about what the actions are and how the system should respond, my developers love it too!

Q: If you could go back 5 years in time and give some professional insight or advice to yourself, what would it be?

A: Understanding the process, and tweaking the process may be best thing for an organization to do.  A new tool is just that…a new tool.  If the problem that the organization is facing is their process, a new tool, no matter how fantastic it is, may not fix the broken process.

Q: What’s one question you wished you were asked in this interview but were not? And how would you answer?

A: What is my favorite tool?  Sticky notes!  Seriously, sometimes the low tech tools can be the most versatile and useful.  I carry a pad of sticky notes with me always, and use them all the time.  Be it to just use to take a quick note or to draft out a process flow with my clients, they come in very handy!

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: Iterate when building software with BPM or PaaS tools.  Start simple, then add complexity or multiplicity.

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Don’t miss Betsy’s presentation, It’s an Agile World: Deploying BPM Tools at the Speed of Thought, at Building Business Capability on Friday, November 10, 2017 from 10:20 am to 11:20 am. Click here to register for attendance.