Forming a Business Analyst Community at ao — Part III
As our community of BAs continues to grow from strength to strength, here’s a quick summary of what has been going on. I’m going to have to revisit the title of my posts in future (though good things come in 3’s right?!)
Our Christmas community day was a blast 🎄🚀
Following on from my last post, we held our last community day of 2018 the week before Black Friday (it’s kind of a big deal for ao 😉) As usual we held this in Manchester, it also meant we could take advantage of the lunch time Christmas markets. We did a couple of great exercises, our icebreaker was a ‘grand design’ activity similar to this ➡️http://www.ventureteambuilding.co.uk/tallest-tower-team-building-challenge/ which helped to warm us up and get a bit competitive…
In the afternoon, one of our project managers — Gemma, ran a ‘stakeholder top trumps’ session. It was a good way to compare stakeholders and identify how we can improve ways of working with them.
In February — we mixed it up 😜
We held a community day in early February once the January blues were well out of the way. This was the first time we ran a ‘real time retro’ in the session. It’s a way to get quick feedback, especially as it highlights things we can do better. A few things which came up were — making sure we listen to each other, don’t talk over each other and we addressed them straight away. It’s something we are going to keep doing going forwards to help us continuously improve. Our retro board was a straightforward; Start, Stop, Continue. All we needed was some post-its and sharpies (standard BA stationary)
It was also the first session where we voted for the content prior to the day using Slack. We have our own private channel to talk all things BA. One day we ended up having a lengthy discussion on Discovery vs Analysis — so we turned this into an agenda point. This is a great example of taking real issues we are dealing with into the community sessions.
Then in the afternoon we did our first escape room. We were split into 3 groups and spent an hour trying to escape from our respective rooms. We had mixed results with only 1 out of 3 teams managing to escape ☹ I wasn’t too bothered at the time but then holding a sign saying ‘you didn’t’ escape’ meant I’m dying to get back in there!
So much of building an effective community is ensuring we understand each other and what makes us tick. There is definite value in mixing up the community days and doing an escape room or something similar was something we’d do again. It was great for team morale and for bonding outside of work (we went for a drink after 🍺)
BA Stand-up 📝
After a quick chat with one of our BAs Adam, he set up a stand-up every other day starting on a Monday. The primary aim was to make sure our actions from the community days were being worked on. We’ve found that it’s a good way for us to stay in touch and reach out when we need help. It’s still early days, we’ve started cheap and now looking at how we expand this to include our BAs in Crewe, Manchester and Telford.
BA Community Day 12 — completed ✔️
Last week we held our latest community day in our Bolton office. We normally hold them in Manchester and what our last session told us was — we should go back to Manchester! This is mainly driven from the fact that Manchester isn’t our normal workplace for a high % of our BAs, so going there has a novelty factor. Normally we’ll have breakfast together, grab a coffee and have a chat before the day starts. We missed that social element to the day as we came in and did our normal day jobs before the start. The feedback we had was it felt too much of a normal day and people couldn’t focus 100% on what was going on. It’s great we can be honest with each other and at least we tried it so we can go back to Manchester (plus the food and drink are better 😉)
We continued with the real-time retro and it was great to action some of the points that were coming up. One of our baking enthusiasts Abi brought in some cakes, the real time retro feedback meant that we now expect cake 🎂
Our guest speaker this time was our project manager Tom coming in to deliver a session on conflict. Conflict is something which is part and parcel of our working lives and Tom got us discussing; our views on conflict, different styles and how to deal with it. Outside speakers really help us freshen up the days and learning is key to our community. Thanks Tom! 👏
We are growing 🐼
Over the past 6 months we’ve welcomed 2 new starters to the community, and they’ve fitted in seamlessly — welcome Catherine and Frankie! It’s great that they’ve come in and played a key part in helping us develop.
Catherine helped facilitate the last community session with Louise. Rotating the facilitation is a key part in keeping our sessions fresh and means no 2 sessions are the same. It also means our facilitators can practise new techniques in a safe environment.
Frankie has come in and started running workshops on; lean and six sigma with the team. Bringing in people who challenge and improve us is key to us developing as a function.
We are talking at BA Conference Europe 2019 🎤
4 AO’ers are speaking at Business Analysis Conference Europe 2019! This is a fantastic nod to the great talent we have at AO, that they’ve been selected to deliver 2 seperate sessions.
Marc and Louise are talking about ‘Playing football with Hippos’ which is a 50-minute talk.
Emily and Adam are running a 3 hour work shop on day 1 — ‘From idea to prioritised backlog — a BAs guide’
You can find the agenda here 🔜 https://irmuk.co.uk/events/business-analysis-conference-europe/#agenda
We are really proud of them putting themselves forward to speak to the wider BA community and tell their stories at the conference. Now the hard work and prep starts!
We are sharing working practises 📤
Lastly, following on from BA Conference Europe 2018, we’ve maintained some great working relationships with companies we met there. We’ve had regular face to face meetings with other like-minded BAs and as a result we’ve been able to share and improve our working practises. Meeting other BAs was definitely one the biggest wins from speaking last year.
Next steps
Our next BA day is scheduled for July where we’ll revisit our actions and look at how we make the world a better place :)
