15 November 2024 Creating True Work-Life Balance: Crafting a Career and Life you Love – Samantha Kiani In a world where career success often comes at the expense of personal wellbeing, executive coach Sam Kiani presented a refreshing approach to work-life balance. In this workshop, Sam explored why true success requires aligning your career with your life’s vision, avoiding burnout, and nurturing mental health along the way. Recognising that everyone’s path is unique, she offered actionable strategies for reflection and long-term sustainability.
15 November 2024 Institutionalisation – is it holding you or your team back? - Chris Pyatt & Remy Schneider Working for a long time for the same organisation or business area can have a negative impact on confidence which, if left unchecked, can affect career prospects and longer-term performance. This session shared insights and reflections about institutionalisation in a work context, with open discussion on its effect and possible means of change. Discussion included: how it can distort our perceptions of the value and skills that we bring as business analysts, why the business analysis profession might be particularly susceptible to this and practical actions to break out of this mindset (including BA tools being put to good use)
15 November 2024 Crafting your job and career: an interactive workshop for BA managers – Charlotte Axon and Kristy Dean People personalise all aspects of their lives - their cars, drinks, clothes, and holidays. Yet we are rarely invited to personalise our work. This is despite clear evidence showing the benefits of personalising work on performance, inclusion, wellbeing, engagement, and growth. Job Crafting is about making small changes to how we act, interact, and think about our work. ‘Career Crafting’ takes this further and encourages us to craft our own career journeys, to align with our strengths, passions, and interests. This interactive workshop brought discussion on: the why, what, and how of job crafting, examples of what job and career crafting looks like in practice and explored practical ideas, tools, and frameworks that attendees could take back to their teams.
15 November 2024 Re-ignite Your Team: Exploring tools and techniques to engage and motivate experienced BAs who’ve run out of steam – Philippa Thomas and Ross Lander This session looked at the challenges faced by organisations to play it right when it comes to creating an energised, productive working environment and professional BA community. We explored ways of breaking down barriers and lifting the motivation and engagement of the team, taking them to a place where individual team members are inspired to thrive and excel at work, rather than “just turn up” to deliver the minimum viable service. Input and discussion included: investigation of today’s challenges with team motivation and engagement, sharing ideas to re-ignite a team, exploring and using new tools and techniques and building best practice.
15 November 2024 Strength Spotting – a powerful practice enabling increased engagement, resilience and energy for yourself and team - Corrine Thomas and Nicole Alderton Much has been written about the benefits of using our strengths across all aspects of our lives. Interestingly, many of us have difficulty identifying our own strengths and in those around us. In addition, most people who can name their strengths say they don’t use them all that much. This insightful and interactive workshop covered the key aspects of: the concept of strengths and empowerment, assessing strengths, being your best in work, recognising strengths in others and team dynamics.
21 June 2024 Embracing a Security Mindset – The Next Frontier of Business Analysis Innovations such as modern ways of working, cloud technologies and process automation have created considerable value and introduced serious security risks. Output from this session includes: examples of security threats; how business analysts can embed a ‘secure-by-design’ mindset in the development process to ensure that projects deliver secure and resilient solutions efficiently.
21 June 2024 How to Integrate User Experience and Business Analysis for Successful Outcomes Output from this workshop includes: an outline of the principles, methods, and deliverables of human-centred design; exploring how to achieve synergies between UX and BA efforts; different ways to harness the activities of UX, user research and user-centred design into current BA services to achieve the best outcomes.
21 June 2024 BA and Business Architecture How do the Business Analysis and Business Architecture roles overlap and complement each other, and should Business Architecture be your next career move? Output from this workshop includes: more information on the Business Architect role; exploring the career path a Business Analyst may take to Business Architecture; the Business Architect tool kit.
21 June 2024 AI and the Business Analysis Role Output from this workshop’s key insights and discussion into the advent of AI includes: BAs making best professional use of AI; the challenges AI presents to the BA role; AI as the technical stakeholder; AI as a potential solution to wider business problems.
21 June 2024 Creative Thinking/Divergent Thinking Divergent Thinking is a key component of Design Thinking and the wider Service Design approach. Output from this session includes details of three useful creativity techniques to add to your professional toolkit: ‘Magnify; ‘Another Person’s Perspective’; ‘Making it Worse.’
