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IIBA.org 2016 Professional Development Chapter Award Winner, Italy Chapter
What is your Chapter’s strategy for growth and engagement?
 
Our strategy for the growth and engagement is to explain business analysis to executives. We talked about business analysis and IIBA® with executives to grow our Chapter Membership. We used a presentation, ‘BA IN 10 Slides’, in order to be understood by Executives and key stakeholders. We also presented to Universities, such as Politecnico; MIP – Milan; University La Cattolica – Milan; and University La Sapienza Rome to promote the introduction of the Level 1 - ECBA™ certification into standard courses; resulting in graduates already being IIBA certified when they start looking for a job.
 
Tell us about the professional development events you offer Corporate Members?
 
We promote the value of certification for developing competencies to our Corporate Members. The Italy Chapter has mentored 5 Corporate Members - Canon Italia, NTT Data, Telecom Italia, Sytel Reply and RAI.
 
We mentored companies that need business analysis approaches and competencies for their business. We talk to professionals, employees and to the executives and decision-makers about the benefits of Corporate Membership. 
 
What is the “Group Exercising Together” Study Group?
 
In addition to a traditional study group, we offer the new “Group Exercising Together” study group. Our VP Education and President mentor students using a web platform, Moodle, for documents repository and a forum for questions. We use multiple choice questions to reproduce the exam situation and challenge the participants to answer questions of different types, including some of them based which are based on situation analysis and some of them based on comprehension of the knowledge areas of the BABOK® Guide. This helps test participants’ level of preparation and improve their level of preparation for writing the exam. The services were free for Chapter Members; and € 30 for non-Members. As of August 2016, 56% of our Members are certified.
 
Thanks to our volunteers' support, this new formula has allowed us to engage BAs interested in their professional development.
 
What type of professional development events do you offer Members?
 
It was challenging opening our first branch in Rome (in 2015).  We engaged and defined an agreement with two top-tier companies NTT Data and Telecom Italia and NTT Data and Telecom. It was not easy and we worked for about 6 months for the definition of the right win-win formula for the startup of the Chapter, mentoring the Directors and volunteers, and planning and organizing the launch. This was the one of the two biggest initiatives carried out in 2015 (the second is the BAWI 2015 – Global Tour with 220 participants, 6 sponsors and brought together the Italy Chapter, Slovenia Chapter and Romania Chapter, plus different associations including ANIMP, IPMA, Assochange and Universities – Urbino and Trento). 
 
How did the Italy Chapter engage Corporate Members to increase awareness?
 
Business analysis is influencing more and more Italian industries day by day,  and the choice to expand our presence over the country couldn’t be any better: at the second annual event (the Business Analysis Rome Meeting - BARM) in Rome, we welcomed almost 150 participants, involved 15 volunteers and established business relationships with the University of Sapienza, the Order of Engineer of Rome, GUFPI ISMA as Partners, and important Italian companies (about 60 organizations). 
 
How did you leverage your lessons learned to support branch start-ups in Italy?
 
On the basis of lessons learnt from the launch of the new Rome branch, we decided to reinforce our strategy for branch development to sustain growth. Last year, we elected a new Director in charge of local start-up initiatives, and consolidated the branch procedure in order to have a common process and rules. Key concepts included: training all branch volunteers on IIBA and Chapter policies and collaborating on local Chapter initiatives; secondly, there are pre-steps to enroll a team of volunteers in order to guarantee the launch of a branch and the quality level of the Chapter – last year we activated the first phase for Genova (first meeting in April 2016); Naples (first meeting in July 2016; Verona (first meeting in July for the team organization, and first evening event on 22 September 2016.
 
Volunteers are key to organizing our events, and with their support, we were able to organize events in new locations with the goal to start the first phase of a branch launch. With volunteer support, we organized 3 events in Rome; and for the first time 1 event in Genova, 1 in Naples and 1 in Verona.
 
Tell us about your LEGO event?
 
In this special event, we introduced the techniques explained in the BABOK® Guide v3 using LEGO parts to introduce a special approach in elicitation and analysis of requirements. This fun approach was very useful not only to clarify the use of some techniques, but also to maintain a strong engagement and interest of people throughout all day.
 
What is the Innovation Challenge (4th Edition)?
 
Teams participating at the event were asked to produce a Charter of their project supported by a
Business Canvas. This event was very helpful in engaging volunteers to coach teams, to help them in understanding the techniques and clarifying doubts about the BABOK®  GuideV3 techniques. We trained 11 teams on BA, Elicitation, CANVAS, Business Case, at Bootcamp of Innovation. We tutored 11 teams for the production of their business model from June to 15 August and 5 teams were helped to prepare their presentations for the final award event on September 14.
 
Innovation Award, 4th Edition involved 30-40 persons during the different phases: mostly Directors and Presidents, Italy Chapter Volunteers, Canon Executives and employees as PM, Marketing, Communications, Legal and Technicians. It took a lot of time and effort to manage all the stakeholders and activities, but the results were outstanding. The theme was Immagina, Impara, Innova = Imagine, Learn, Innovate.
 
We provided Canon with both the experience on innovation context and the skills and knowledge of business strategy to train and tutor the teams (Learn). It was interesting because we reached a new target: Students - starter uppers with ideas, but no business knowledge. Teams participating got an approach to business analysis from the Chapter and technology support from Canon.
 
Teams asked for a BA approach and we answered through engaging Chapter Directors and Active Volunteers.
 
First, we presented BA concepts, BABOK® Guide framework, Strategy Analysis, CANVAS and
Business Case techniques and performed Group Work for elicitation during the Bootcamp
event and then we prepared a presentation and mentored the tutors. Tutors supported 11 teams
for the preparation of their CANVAS Models to present for the next selection phase. Teams
worked with their tutors and were able to elaborate their CANVAS Models. Five teams were
selected for the final event and awards.
 
There were many Innovation Challenge events organized by companies in various sectors: Banks, Energy, ICT, Assurance, but thanks to the collaboration with Canon, the IIBA Italy Chapter obtained high visibility and we are proud to have mentored all teams that participated to the final stage and facilitated the realization of good Business Case and Business Canvas dedicated to each project. All documents were prepared using IIBA templates.
 
Canon Italia provided marketing and communication support activating the communication plan,
through social channels. At the Bootcamp, we took pictures and video of the teams and the event that gave us great visibility. Thanks to Canon Italia we are engaging relevant stakeholders as Unicredit Bank. 
 
 
Congratulations to Italy Chapter. Next month, we profile the United Kingdom Chapter, 2016 Outreach Chapter Award Winner.