Immagina, Impara, Innova = Imagine, Learn, Innovate

Collaborating and brainstorming can take many formats. As a professional association it is important to share the work done by our local Chapters around the world to inspire, communicate ideas and provide value.

If something works well in one region it may also work very well across the globe with your local community of BA professionals. Sharing success stories can also help promote self-analysis, what I mean is it gets you thinking about how you can apply these learnings to your group, and it gives you a view of your strengths and weaknesses. A program spearheaded by one Chapter could even lead to other Chapters working together to offer various perspectives to provide solutions to meet your members’ needs, such as we have seen with multi-Chapter Professional Development Days in Europe, Australia and North America.

 

Recently, the Rome branch of IIBA® Italy Chapter shared the results of their annual agile workshop. The Rome Chapter has taken a collaborative and experiential approach to exploring agile through interactive workshop sessions focusing on the role of a business analyst on an agile team. Using the Learning by Doing method to transform a business idea -from ideation to realization – of a concept [or a service], the workshop encourages participants to explore scenario-based challenges in an agile context.

Their creative approach enables the Italy Chapter to host workshops with a fun twist. Such as their Product Box, a collaborative game utilizing the product box technique focusing on an assigned theme where participants build their own Product Backlog and start their first Sprint; empirically understanding how business analysis can support agile roles and facilitating business development needs in a product increment, through value-driven interactions. Another theme they successfully launched was an imaginary Scrum Farm aptly titled No matter if you are a pig or a chicken, a business analyst can empower your scrum farm. The Scrum Farm workshop explored the role of Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development Team. Another workshop they recently ran explored How to transform your Business Idea into Real Value, focusing on learning and experimenting with the agile strategy, teams used the Elevator Pitch technique (a communication method used to illustrate a project or idea in just a few minutes) to present a business concept on a topical subject: edible insects as sustainable food alternatives. Teams also tested Impact Mapping  agile techniques (mind map that represents the path from a specific business objective to the actions needed to achieve it), and the Minimum Viable Product (creation of an initial version of a product / service, which includes only the minimum set of characteristics needed to immediately collect customer feedback), to test the value of their solutions and obtain market validation, with respect to the main features.

These scenario-based challenges are just part of IIBA Italy Chapter’s BARM (Business Analysis Rome Meeting) workshop events focusing on the role of a business analyst on an agile team. For a glimpse of the actual experience view their slides on SlideShare https://goo.gl/GmWXJj and photos from the event on Flickr https://goo.gl/xT1dXH). 

 

 

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