BBC 2017 Speaker Series – Practitioners:  Connie Kobal IT Analyst and Belinda Honigfort, Consultant, IT Analysis at Nationwide

Regarding their co-presentation at Building Business Capability in Orlando, Nov. 6-10, 2017, we asked Connie Kobal, IT Analyst and Belinda Honigfort, Consultant, IT Analysis at Nationwide, a few questions about transforming the business. Check out this interview in relation to their BBC co-presentation entitled, Rapid Alignment — Expediting Project Launches with Facilitation Best Practices.

Q: In what ways do you see your group helping your organization handle business transformation?

A: The introduction of Rapid Alignment has streamlined the launch of projects and the entire software development lifecycle by assembling the stakeholders who will have an impact on or who will be impacted by the project to ensure they know what’s coming and what’s expected. The goal is to get alignment early in the process across these stakeholders to eliminate scope churn. An informed group is a prepared group.

By getting stakeholder alignment on the scope of the effort early in the lifecycle to eliminate scope churn as the effort progresses.

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

A: The focus is to move to a continuous delivery mindset by implementing smaller business capabilities on a more frequent basis to eliminate the big bang deployment approach.

Q: What are your short-term goals for becoming more agile?

A: Smaller bundles of work built in a more incremental fashion.

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

A: Change is hard and a good OCM plan is a critical component of success.

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

A: Change is constant; be willing to reinvent yourself to expedite delivery.

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

A: The implementation of scope decomposition done in an iterative manner enabling an incremental transition to the development team to support the delivery of business value early and often. This approach has yielded a 60 day savings in the software development lifecycle.

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

A: Acknowledge that change is hard and to be persistent and patient. Be structured and direct; engage practitioners you trust, especially those you know will share and carry out the vision.

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

A: Question: How our process has impacted our organization. Answer: Due to the implementation of our new process, we have saved over $5 million since inception.

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

A: How to streamline project launches where stakeholders come away feeling engaged, empowered and aligned with others thus setting the project on the right path.

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Connie and Belinda’s presentation, Rapid Alignment — Expediting Project Launches with Facilitation Best Practices, at Building Business Capability was presented on Wednesday, November 8, 2017.