BBC 2017 Speaker Series – Consultant: Dean Larson at Enterprise Analysis Consulting

In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Orlando, Nov. 6-10, 2017, we asked Dean Larson, Enterprise Business Analyst Consultant at Enterprise Analysis Consulting, a few questions about transforming the business. Check out this interview in relation to HIS HER BBC presentation entitled, Business Analysis and Architecture Support of Large, Scaled-Agile Programs.

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

A: There are two ways that I help clients:

1)     Provide actionable insights into the business domain that is undergoing transformation; and

2)     Introduce and demonstrate effective business analysis and architecture methods that the client can utilize across the organization.

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

A: A common obstacle that organizations face is “legacy” thinking.  I help them overcome this by conducting in-depth analysis of the business domain, the enterprise strategy, and the stakeholders’ needs.  The output from this analysis helps clients to see the issues and options in a new light.

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

A: Provide your Product Owners and Program Sponsors with high-powered BA support.  Also, do your best to model the relevant processes, information, and capabilities.  This is very helpful because it provides multiple agile teams with a common platform of information for the initiatives, epics, and stories in their backlogs.

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

A: Business architecture artifacts are most effective when they are aligned to solution architecture artifacts. The coordination effort needed for this alignment can be hard, but if done well, the architectures compliment the effectiveness of 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: Always seek to provide decision makers with context, insights, and options.  The decision environment that organizations face is complex and often in flux.  It’s our job as BAs to provide our clients with the information they need to navigate that environment.

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

A: Well done BPMN process models always seem to provide clients with “aha” moments of clarity and insight.  There are a lot of ad-hoc, amateurish process diagrams out there.  So when a client gets a good process model that is properly abstracted and designed for the task at hand, they really appreciate it.

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

A: Seek out client engagements where you are delivering analysis findings up to business decision makers (e.g. executives, program/project sponsors).  Providing solution requirements to development teams is good, but delivering enterprise level insight and options up to decisions makers is more rewarding and impactful.

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

A: What is the relationship between business analysis and business architecture?  My answer is that business architecture is accomplished through the application of enterprise level business analysis.

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: Attendees will learn the modeling techniques that are most effective at providing support for multiple teams on a large scaled-agile program.

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Don’t miss Dean’s presentation, Business Analysis and Architecture Support of Large, Scaled-Agile Programs, at Building Business Capability on Thursday, November 9, 2017 from 9:00 to 10:00 am.  Click here to register for attendance.