Jeffery Mortimer

• How is your presentation relevant to the theme of this year’s BBC conference: Innovation in the Fast Lane?

The ability to innovate in the fast lane requires that you do iterations with quick feedback loops from customers on those ideas which is what the agile methodologies are all about. Making sure as a business analysts you understand how you fit into this changing environment and can help be a part of the innovation is what my talk will be about. I will talk through how the skills needed are changing and how instead of long requirements gathering timelines, you need to be able to use things like story mapping to get a quick overall picture and start to iterate of those ideas with the key stakeholders engaged throughout the process. This requires some people step out of their comfort zone of having approvals on everything we work on and much more engagement from our stakeholders.

• What are your top tips for companies or employees wishing to innovate?

My suggestion is to evaluate the agile principles and the method that will work best for your organization. I have been lucky to be a part of some very innovative companies from capital one, quicken loans, and dominos. A few things i have seen that have worked well were:

• Creating a “tiger” team that is given the ability to develop in a true iterative fashion outside of your normal processes. This pulls the best people you have into one team and allows them to take ideas and truly innovate fast of them. This requires trust from leadership to allow this team to do things and have autonomy more than they are used to.
• Create an innovation time/space where you have people work on ideas. Quicken had this thing called bullet time which was Monday afternoons and had 3 rules, you could not work on things related to your normal day job, you had to work on something beneficial to the company, and you had to either be innovative or growing you personally.
• Look for the cutting edge things and how your company could use them. Dominos did this with the autonomous vehicle for example and there is an entire team here that is dedicated to trying ideas out in stores and seeing how they work.