In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Oct 31, – Nov. 4, 2016, we asked Paul Franz, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled, Business Rules and the Real World.

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

A: I see sharing of business analysis and business architecture techniques and lessons learned between organizations as a method to improve how each organization approaches existing and new projects.

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

A: Within my organization, I still observe a reluctance to share lessons learned between new business analysts and more mature business analysts.  Establishing Business Analysis Centers of Excellence could help address this.  I don’t see enough organizations establishing BA Centers of Excellence yet.

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

A: I have observed a number of agile projects struggling with missing or not meeting stakeholder needs towards the end of the projects.  My short term goal is to improve communications between stakeholders and project teams by ensuring that stakeholder needs are validated earlier and more often.

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

A: Enterprise and Business Architecture have become more important on the projects that I am involved with.

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

A: The need to perform Enterprise and Business Architecture analysis has become more important on the projects that I am involved with.

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: We have been implementing RuleXpress on some of our projects to clarify business rules.  To date, the activity of clarifying the business rules has brought to light required functionality and rules that we would have missed otherwise.

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

A: Spending some time on our customers projects considering the business architecture would have resolved some of the problems that we have encountered a lot earlier and for a lot less effort.

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: Validating clearly worded business rules and business requirements as early as possible with stakeholders is critical.

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Don’t miss Paul’s presentation, Business Rules and the Real World, at Building Business Capability on Thursday, November 3, 2016 from 2:10 to 3:10 pm. Click here to register for attendance.