BBC 2017 Speaker Series – Practitioner: Mary Sue Moore

In anticipation of her presentation at Building Business Capability in Orlando, Nov. 6-10, 2017, we asked Mary Sue Moore, Principal Business Architect at Asurion, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out her interview in relation to her BBC presentation entitled, How to Survive and Prosper in a Transformation.

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

A: Our EBA organization helps with understanding current state, future state and the potential paths to solving the gaps between the two from a capability gap, product-feature gap, or solution -gap perspective.

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

A: Helping others see that modeling and data analysis of the models can truly help point out the path to success has been a challenge in an environment that focuses on getting today’s challenges solved.  Taking the time to think about options, perspectives, and opportunities is not an inherent skill.  It needs to be facilitated and successes need to be demonstrated.

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

A: We employ a Product Management discipline which has dual-Agile tracks: one for Discovery which feeds ‘proven ideas’ into the track for Engineering.  It’s pretty agile to begin with.

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

A: Champions are critical; relationships are key; flexibility without losing sight of optimum means there will be another day to fight for success.

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

A: Keeping abreast of new developments in industry: if you work in a billing space you should learn about industry advancements, not just what your internal team is planning on doing.  If you work in customer care, you should understand what new advancements communications bots bring to the table.  Learn how to find out about ‘new’ concepts, ideas and tools, even if you have no plans for adoption yet.

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: Marty Cagan’s Product Management focused discipline, adapted for our corporate environment.  There are good results for teams that have been able to fully transfer to this new-to-us discipline, fully able to focus.

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

A: Learn more about data services: data lakes, pooling, data relationships.  At the root of most functionality is the data that it works with.  There have been quite a few data analytic advancements.  I would cultivate relationships with Data Scientists!

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

A: Why do you want to share your experiences with BBC Conference?

The community of support is key to advancing the BA and BusArch disciplines.  Through sharing our experiences, I hope that others can jump start their work and efforts to be more successful.  When we all share and learn from each other, we all improve.  I would like to start some conversations around experiences in transforming and what it takes to successfully transform individually, as a team, and as a corporation.

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 hope attendees take away encouragement for being an intentional adopter of transformation and why it’s good to think through what’s being asked during a transformation and how the individual and/or team fits within the new vision.

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Don’t miss Mary Sue’s presentation, How to Survive and Prosper in a Transformation, at Building Business Capability on Thursday, November 9, 2017, from 10:40 am to 11:40 am. Click here to register for attendance.