BBC 2017 Speaker Series – Consultant: Kristen Seer, Senior Consultant at Business Rule Solutions, LLC

Regarding her presentation at Building Business Capability in Orlando, Nov. 6-10, 2017, we asked Kristen Seer, Senior Consultant at Business Rule Solutions, LLC, a few questions about transforming the business. Check out this interview in relation to her BBC presentation entitled, The Life of a Business Rule: Enabling Impact Analysis through Traceability.

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

A: We believe in taking a structured, methodological approach to handling business transformation. We start with understanding the mission and goals, and then develop a sound business strategy through the use of our Policy Charter technique. We focus not just on processes, but the policies and business rules that govern them.

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

A: So often, it comes down to communication. As a business analyst, I love to model things, but the real work is in socializing the vision for the future state!

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

A: Focus on being an agile business, not on agile systems development. By that I mean really understand your business architecture and use it to guide your business transformation decisions.

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

A: The world is changing so quickly. It’s very exciting, but can be overwhelming. As business analysts, we have a great skill set to help businesses adapt to the changing environment.

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

A: The level of complexity in business and technology is increasing at an incredible rate (just look at machine learning!). In order to make everything work, it’s important to start with the vocabulary – what are the terms you use in your business? How to they fit together? Getting consensus on this is a huge challenge but it’s foundational to everything else. I was thrilled to see Concept Modeling added as a technique in BABOK v3.0 as I’ve used it successfully for many years to organize business vocabulary.

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: We help a lot of clients with managing their business rules. Many of them are now at the point where the hard work they’ve put in capturing and specifying their business rules is starting to reap major benefits as they can demonstrate transparency and compliance through traceability of their business rules from source to implementation (which is, of course, the topic of my presentation).

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

A: It’s a cliché, and it’s never changed over the years, but my advice is to keep open to new ideas and keep learning new techniques and approaches. I believe it’s important for a Business Analyst to have a toolkit at their disposal and be able to draw on the right tool for the right task; so the more tools you have, the more prepared you are to develop business solutions.

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

A: “Why do I love coming to the BBC year after year?” There’s no other conference like it! I’ve made many friends over the years and I love to get together and share our stories. It’s also been wonderful to see the business analysis profession evolve and grow, reflected in the breadth and depth of presentations (so many themes!).

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

A: Managing traceability of business rules is a lot like managing traceability of requirements, and yet it’s not the same thing at all!

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Kristen’s presentation, The Life of a Business Rule: Enabling Impact Analysis through Traceability, at Building Business Capability was presented on Wednesday, November 8, 2017.