The IAF Chicago Chapter has its first event coming up on Friday, December 9th. The event is from 4:00 pm until 7:00 pm. It’s being held at The Thinkubator Innovation Center on 312 N. May Street, Suite 6D, Chicago, IL 60607.
This event should be very exciting. The topic of the event is Creating the Appropriate Solution to Ensure Success. We will begin with an exercise to draw out ideas from the attendees about what they’ve encountered and/or done about creating appropriate solutions. After that, Rocky Romero will step the attendees through the use of Business Model Canvas to design solutions to enable you to help clients create appropriate solutions. We’ll finish with an Open Space exercise to explore the topic in more detail. This event will be totally interactive and attendees will be experiencing ideas more than just hearing about them. Join us for this exciting event.
Posts Tagged ‘Data Modeling’
IAF Chicago Chapter – Fall Event
Sunday, November 13th, 2011 by Gary Rush, CPFWI BADD – Wisconsin IIBA Conference Presentation
Tuesday, October 12th, 2010 by Gary Rush, CPFWell, it’s been a busy month. After returning from Nigeria, Millie and I took a well-deserved vacation in Puerto Rico.
We returned and drove to Madison, Wisconsin for the 2010 WI BADD (Business Analyst Development Day) conference. What a conference. Over 500 people attended – making it the largest BA event in the country and in a down economy. The organizers did a fabulous job – people like Roxanne Miller, Dave DeBruine, Nora Medina, and the others at the various Wisconsin IIBA Chapters should be commended for the work they put into this conference. It was well handled, contained many outstanding sessions, and went smoothly. We had our booth there to show Business Analysts that gaining facilitator skills will greatly enhance their analyst capabilities and their relationships with their clients.
I attended an excellent session by Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg regarding Decision Modeling. The decision model, along with a process model and a data model, completes the picture of a business. Capturing business logic – what the decision model does – is very helpful and makes good sense. I’m going to be investigating this further. You can check out the ideas at www.TheDecisionModel.com.
In the afternoon, I gave my presentation – actually facilitated a workshop – A FoCuSeD Business Analysis Workshop. Along the lines of the fishbowl session in April, I asked for volunteers to be participants in a workshop to define processes and data needs for Conference Attendee Management. I set up the situation, facilitated the volunteer participants (who did an outstanding job), and closed with questions from the audience regarding the workshop. It went very well (even though I had contracted Dengue Fever and was just beginning my bout with it – it isn’t contagious).
Gary facilitating the audience at WI BADD 2010
Next year, the conference is on October 11, 2011. If you are a BA or work with BAs, you should attend. I know I’ll be there 
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Data Modeling & Teleconferences
Friday, July 16th, 2010 by Gary Rush, CPFI just returned from facilitating a data model workshop. We’ve been working on this since January with three face-to-face workshops and interim teleconference workshops. It’s interesting that the client, who is very experienced with teleconferencing, felt that the face-to-face workshops were essential to the success of this effort. I agree. The teleconferences were beneficial and worked well in developing pieces of the model, but a model is very visual. Even with good Internet tools and the ability to view desktops, etc., the group needed to see the entire model (very large) and get up and move elements around – something you can’t do as well via a teleconference. So, while I support the use of teleconferences, and they work well when properly facilitated, there are still times when we need to get in a room together and work things out. It is still nice to connect with others by seeing them in person and chatting with them during breaks – face-to-face interaction is still key.
Data Modeling and IIBA
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 by Gary Rush, CPFWell, the first week of May was busy. I spent two days in Miami facilitating a Data Modeling workshop. It was difficult but enjoyable. It’s always difficult because I find that Data Modeling really helps a business think through how they’ll manage their business – much more so than process modeling does. It forces the business to think through policies and scenarios more thoroughly. This one, in particular, was tough. It was the culmination of a 3-day workshop in January and two WebEx virtual workshops so the group was finishing the model. They are the type of participants who really think things through – which was great, but required a lot of pushing to get it done. What they ended up with was very good and well thought out. It is especially gratifying because the group had never worked with a Data Model before and was now fully engaged and supportive of the modeling technique. It’d be great if groups took this kind of ownership.
After facilitating the Data Modeling workshop for two days, I came home and then drove to Des Moines, Iowa to speak at an IIBA conference for the Central Iowa IIBA Chapter. I gave two presentations – one on Data Modeling (apparently a theme for the week) and a keynote presentation about why BA’s should be facilitative. The conference went well and was well managed. There were almost 200 attendees. I gave the Data Modeling presentation before lunch. It was well attended, the attendees enjoyed it, and I may have converted some to use Data Modeling more. My keynote presentation on why BA’s should be facilitative was at the end of the conference. It went very well and I think that we’ll see more BA’s using facilitative skills in the future. I have to thank the Central Iowa IIBA Chapter for putting on such an enjoyable conference.