2020 BA Slash Advent Calendar (Part 2 of 4)
By: Monique Ho
Tags: Business Analysis, Digital Transformation, Lightning Decision Jam, Service Design, User Research

Lightning Decision Jam [Day 16]

Catch up on the event introducing Lightning Decision Jam. Monique Ho from BAE Systems Applied Intelligence took us through step-by-step on framing problems, generating & prioritising ideas efficiently. No room for HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) & endless, circular debates. Suitable for in-person & virtual workshops on ANY projects (from marketing to manufacturing, from software development to sale).

🏗 3 key building blocks

Collaborate by working alone Dot voting — quiet time to think individually, no discussion Timekeeping — Don’t let some random discussions de-rail the process

The flow of LDJ

✔️ What works now — create positivity in the workshop

🤦‍♀️ Problems — The most frustrating things around the theme of interest

🤔 How Might We’s — Make problems broad enough to come up with specific solutions later within helpful boundaries

💡Solutions — Be creative, write as many, no details needed

⚖️ Impact/Effort — Prioritise solutions, decide what to do next

👨‍🔬 Timeboxed Experiment — Design small actionable tasks to find signals

✅ Check out the top tips of facilitation: bit.ly/ba-slash-monique-1

Service Design [Day 18]

Catch up on the event where Kevin Yuen took us through what front stage and backstage are in the context of service design and how these input to the service blueprint. He also shared his views on how activities of service design and business analysis contribute to the double-diamond design process model.

✅ For a concise walk-through, check out the recording here: bit.ly/ba-slash-kevin-6

User Research [Day 14]

We published the event summary on User Research of our first Ask & Solve session. Helena Bishop kindly shared her experience with those who were new to the topic. We talked about what user researchers do, mindset, frustrating moments (& quick fixes), 3 things to make user researchers lives easier, and wrapped up with some quality resources.

✅ For more, check out the full article here: bit.ly/ba-slash-ask-solve-user-research

Digital Transformation [Day 20]

Explore a digital transformation journey brought to us by Daniel Callaghan. He took us through an approach he used at the @Government Legal Department. There are lots of recommended tools and resources in the presentation:

Business capability template (a one-pager to show Activities, People, Business Services, Business Capabilities, Processes, Systems, Outputs) 📜 HM Treasury Green Book 📗 and Blue Book 📘: guidance on how to appraise and evaluate policies, projects and programmes (bit.ly/gov-green-blue-books) Government Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA): Principles for project success; assurance review toolkit 🔍 (bit.ly/gov-ipa) GDS Digital Service Standard: references to help teams create and run great public services 📐 (bit.ly/gds-service-std) Job roles in the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Profession & skills needed at each role level 🖼 (bit.ly/ddat-framework) Business Analyst role profile published by GDS 👤 (bit.ly/gov-ba-role-profile) Digital Marketplace to buy skills & technology 💹 (bit.ly/digital-marketplace)

✅ Watch the full recording of the event here: bit.ly/ba-slash-daniel-7

Want more?

See our achievements and retrospective of 2020 in this article.

Part 1 focusses on Agile , Stakeholder Management , People Empowerment and Core Business Analysis .

, , and . Part 3 has Data Protection , Data Science , Cyber Security and some exciting icebreakers .

, , and some exciting . Part 4 includes Business Architecture, Business Case and personal development (mentoring & mindfulness).

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