In anticipation of his co-presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Nov. 2 – 6, 2015, we asked Michael Aldor, Senior Manager at MNP LLP, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled, Build Your Analyst Design Toolkit.

Q: How is your organization advancing the pursuit of business excellence and how does it impact your business units/departments?

A: Our organization, MNP, specializes in helping organizations pursue business excellence. MNP is a leading Canadian professional services firm that provides accounting, tax and consulting expertise to its clients. The MNP Technology Consulting business unit specializes in helping organizations make use of technology to reach their organizational goals. We help our client by delivering both strategic services such as providing guidance to CIO’s and operational services which include providing specialists to solve technology problems.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing a more cohesive and productive company or organization?

A:  MNP is a fast growing organization. We are continuously building on our knowledge and experience to satisfy the needs of our customers. Our biggest challenge and our biggest advantage is maintaining a disciplined approach for continuously improving our practice. We work to grow our practices through hiring great people and providing a repository of knowledge, methodologies, and lessons learned to better our practices.

Q: What are your near term goals for creating a more agile organization at your business or company?

A: Our Technology Consulting group utilizes agile practices to help ourselves and our clients realize benefits of change-driven projects. MNP promotes the fundamental principles within the agile manifesto. Our short term goals are to improve collaboration and continuous improvement practices.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in 2015 thus far? What’s the most important goal/trend for [pick one or two: business analysts, business architects, business process managers and/or business rules managers] to keep in mind?

A: 2015 saw the release of the BABOK 3. The re-definition of Business Analysis was an important step to better position the Business Analysis discipline to help organizations embrace change. There are many valuable takeaways from the BABOK 3 for business analysts to become better practitioners. Business analysts will benefit from greater success in their initiatives through combining a change strategy around existing organizational capabilities and focusing on achieving organizational goals.

I would really like to see more organizations implement Business Analysis practices and empower the business analyst practitioners to implement changes. Business Analysts have the role of selecting and designing solutions that meet organizational goals. In my opinion more organizations should create teams around the strategic Business Analysis function so that organizational strategies can be better achieved.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you have implemented to help your organization or business run more efficiently and effectively?

A: Our talk during the session is focused on Stanford’s design methods. We are using these methods to help analysts and designers empathize with our customers and design better solutions through iterative analysis and prototyping. We have found that using these methods helps provide structure and discipline in ensuring that the solutions developed match our customers’ real needs. The goal is to get a deeper understanding of what the challenges and solution options are, and then prototype the variants to see what solutions fits best.

Q: If you could give your five-years-ago self insight and advice about this industry, what would you say?

A: Get involved in the community earlier! I have been VP of Professional Development of the Winnipeg IIBA Chapter for the last 3 1/2 years. I have learned a lot from my colleagues. My only regret is waiting so long to get involved.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at Building Business Capability?

A: This talk is very practical for Business Analysis practitioners who want to become more agile in their analysis and design. The Stanford design methods provide some proven, real world techniques to help you define and design better solutions. Through our talk, you will learn the importance of:

• Empathizing with your clients
• Showing your solution vs telling
• Ideation and getting feedback early

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Don’t miss Michael’s co-presentation, Build Your Analyst Design Toolkit, at Building Business Capability on Thursday, November 5, 2015 from 11:50 am to 12:50 pm.  Click here to register for attendance.