BBC 2017 Speaker Series – Consultant: Kathleen (Kitty) B. Hass, President and Principal Consultant at Kathleen Hass & Associates, Inc.

In anticipation of her presentations at Building Business Capability in Orlando, Nov. 6-10, 2017, we asked Kathleen (Kitty) B. Hass, President and Principal Consultant at Kathleen Hass & Associates, Inc., a few questions about transforming the business. Check out this interview in relation to her BBC presentations entitled, Enterprise Level Business Analysis Practices to Improve Results and Transformative BA Training and Education to Meet the New Business Reality

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

A: I use design principles and design thinking to ensure innovation when “designing the transformation.”

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

A: It is difficult to get senior management involved so that the transformation is truly top-down instead of bottom-up, which almost always fails.

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

A: Consider transitioning to agile management and agile development involves a fundamental cultural shift.  Treat the transformation to agile as an effort to design an entire new business model.  Engage every level of the organization, starting with senior management.  Capture and communicate real value from agile activities.

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

A: I have learned that the business analyst is rapidly transitioning to a strategic role, designing and executing major business transformation efforts.

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

A: The most important goal for business professionals is to continually enhance their skills and competencies, and to put themselves at the forefront of business change.  Put these competencies into your development plan: innovation, complexity, collaboration, strategic communication to transform yourself into a business analyst working at the enterprise level.  Determine which specialty you want to pursue, as you also enhance your leadership skills.

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: Enterprise business analysis.  It is taking the business world by storm.  Don’t miss out!

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 partnerships; engage in “radical collaboration”.  I would enroll in some of the Stanford Design Institutes courses.

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

A: The question is: What is your passion?  The answer is this: I am passionate about helping businesses complete their change initiatives resulting in tangible business benefits in the form of value to the customer and wealth to the bottom line.  Right now, major change efforts that involve technology are only successful about one-third of the time.  This involves huge waste in investment of recourses, some say costing the U.S. one trillion dollars per year.

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:  The take-away from my presentation is this: an understanding of the critical importance of the 21^st century business analyst, and suggestions for BA professional development to transition to an enterprise, strategic asset.

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Don’t miss Kathleen’s presentation, Enterprise Level Business Analysis Practices to Improve Results, Tuesday, November 7, 2017 from 1:30 to 4:30 pm, and Transformative BA Training and Education to Meet the New Business Reality on Thursday, November 9, 2017 from 8:00 to 8:50 am at Building Business Capability. Click here to register for attendance.