In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Oct 31, – Nov. 4, 2016, we asked Jean Falardeau, Director, Architecture and Business Analysis at AFI Expertise, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled, Managing Requirements Like Assets –  From Text Centric to Artefact Based Requirement Management.

Q: In what ways do you see your group helping your organization pursue business excellence?

A: We pursue this goal through multiple channels. We provide training on best practices in business analysis, we advise companies to adopt these practices, we present lectures on success cases study and we influence the practices of groups of private and public sectors.

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

A: A major challenge is to create the sense of urgency to act to improve. By default, people are comfortable in the status quo. The great difficulty is to find the right ways to make people uncomfortable in their status quo.

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

A: I would say to my clients (large organizations) is to continue pilot projects in agile and stay focused on the goal of agility adapted to the context of each organization. Also, to learn from these pilots and constantly improve the Agile practice. We must give reasonable improvement goals and also short-term.

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

A: I realized that we should not give up if you have a great idea pocket, such as promoting best practices in business analysis. Sometimes companies do not listen, but they eventually accept this position. We must persist and listen to his instincts.

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

A: The future is bright. This is a complete reversal of the trade that is already short and that will continue. Business analysts become actors increasingly strategic and improved practices will continue to accelerate.

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: I had the chance to implement a complete solution for managing business requirements throughout, including an enterprise repository, collaboration, linkages with development backlog and test. This solution supported all practices BABOK 3.0 including the life cycle of business requirements.

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

A: I would have put more effort on promoting professional as CBAP and better encourage colleagues to certify in business analysis.

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

A: Is the learning curve of best practices in business analysis is long? In fact, it may be as short as a few weeks, I have had the evidence. With the right tools, it is possible to improve the practices of a business analyst in just one month!

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: I will focus on quality throughout: the quality of the business requirements as an input, quality of application code (or the application parameterization) and quality of runway end testing.

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Don’t miss Jean’s presentation, Managing Requirements Like Assets –  From Text Centric to Artefact Based Requirement Management, at Building Business Capability on Thursday, November 3, 2016 from 10:40 to 11:40 am. Click here to register for attendance.