Being moderator of the track "BA & Agile Practices"at the 2022 BA & Beyond conference in Belgium

Now, March 2022, that the pandemic seems to slowly fade out, we all enjoy to meeting again personally at conferences. My name is Rainer Wendt (most left on the title photo) and I am going share some impressions and take-aways of the BA&Beyond conference (www.ba-beyond.eu), March 15th, 2022 in Leuven, which is close to Brussels in Belgium.

With our company masVenta Business GmbH we are hosting the European Business Analysis Day (www.ba-day.com) in Frankfurt and since several years we maintain a close partnership between the two conferences. In the course of this, Filip Hendrickx, my friend and IIBA colleague and one of the guys behind the BA&Beyond asked me to moderate one of the theme tracks and of course I immediately confirmed to do so.

Arriving: venue and the atmosphere

This time it was in Leuven which is even a bit closer to Germany than Brussels but, more importantly, no hassles with traffic and parking, everything easy to access and very comfortable. The venue, provided by the sponsor Adapt & Enable (www.ae.be/en), is nice and comes with a professional and relaxed atmosphere, capable of holding several hundreds of visitors. What I found impressive is the level of professionalism in terms of the hybrid approach of this conference. The audience was half on-site and half remote, and so were the speakers. The audio and video quality was perfect, I would say this is the benchmark for other hybrid conferences. Chapeau!

Unfortunately I only had time to attend this single day while the conference lasts over four days, two in Brussels (Leuven) in Belgium and two in Amsterdam in The Netherlands. So I can only report from Tuesday, March 15th, 2022, being moderator in the track "BA & Agile Practises"

The presentations in "BA & Agile Practices"

The presentations in this track started Tuesday after lunch with Annelies van der Meulen and her speech "Ensuring quality in an agile context through architectural planning".

As I always do when introducing a speaker at a conference, I had a quick chat with her before she started and as well because I was quite curious. Architecture in agile initiatives is often under time pressure, especially if the work is done time-boxed in the agile iterations or sprints. Annelies appealed to do the work for the architecture before the actual start of development, to have a stable planning in the sprints, save time and reduce stress.?From my personal experience I think she is right. I have seen many situations where the architecture has been challenged along the way, causing delays and thus stress for the development teams in their sprints. A perfect start to the presentations, thanks Annelies!

The following presentation was given remotely by Mindy Bohannon. Mindy shared good practises for Retrospectives and emphasized the importance of learning from failures. The basis for effective lessons learned is a company and team culture that encourages and even demands such tasks. Very insightful presentation Mindy!

Next speaker Wouter Nieuwenburg is a remarkable long distance or better "Ultra Trail" runner and reported on how he improved through thorough and continuous analysis of the challenges he faced. There are many similarities between sport projects and BA projects so that BAs can benefit from insights taken from sport. Interesting, thank you!

Finally, Lavina Wiebe from Calgary elaborated on the topic of being a BA in an agile Scrum world. As we know, neither project managers nor Business Analysts are mentioned in the original Scrum paper by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber. The question of whether there is still a place for BAs in agile Scrum teams is being debated for years. Lavina shared some interesting anecdotes from her 25 years of experience, e.g. about the myth that agile makes documentation obsolete. Of course it doesn′t! Thank you Lavina for the various eye- openers!

The BA & Beyond has been held the 5th time and as a managing director of a conference organiser I have to say: well done! I am looking forward to further cooperation between BA & Beyond and European BA-DAY. Next year the BA conference season is starting with our conference in Frankfurt, on the nice date 23/3/23, for more information please go to www.ba-day.com.

With Warm regards?

Rainer Wendt

MD masVenta Business GmbH and ba-day.com