Facts Tell, Stories Sell + Getting to the Essence (2 Half-Day Workshops)
25 March 2020 (9h30-17h30)
Location: Crowne Plaza Le Palace (Brussels City Center)
Presented in English by Lori Silverman and Alec Sharp
Price: 600 EUR (excl. 21% VAT)
This event is history, please check out the List of Upcoming Seminars, or send us an email
Check out these related open workshops:
- Generatieve Business Analyse (4de sessie) (May 28, 2024)
Check out our related in-house workshops:
- BPMN 2.0 Syntax and Positioning (In-Company) (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- BPMN 2.x in Practice (In-Company Workshop) (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- Case Modellering en CMMN in de Praktijk (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- Business Analyse Technieken (Workshop) (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- BPMN Jumpstart (In-Company) (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- Case Modelling and CMMN in Practice (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- Lean Business Analyse (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- BizAgi Modeler in Theorie en Praktijk (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- Business Analyse Technieken (Tweedaagse Workshop) (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- Business Rule Modellering met DMN en BPMN (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- Business Analysis Agility (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
- Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) Demystified (INHOUSE WORKSHOP - On Request)
Learning Objectives
Join our two half-day workshops
Like last year, we organise a pre-conference workshop day in Brussels, with 2 parallel tracks.
You are looking at the information about the half-day workshops on "Facts Tell, Stories Sell" and "Getting to the Essence" with Lori Silverman and Alec Sharp. You can find information on the other track, a full-day workshop on "Discover and Improve your Facilitation Skills" with Karen Peirens here.
Facts Tell, Stories Sell: Moving From Data to Decision and Action
Our half-day workshop with Lori Silverman (Shift Strategist, Founder and CEO, Partners for Progress®):
Companies are spending huge amounts of time, energy and money on collecting, cleaning, analysing and reporting on data, without having an overall process to turn this data into new insights, insights into good decisions, and decisions into meaningful actions.
Lori Silverman will present a collaborative step-by-step approach for doing this correctly in her workshop on March 25th in Brussels.
Lori is the author of 3 books: "Stories Trainers Tell", "Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over, and "Business Storytelling for Dummies". With her third bestseller, she really solidified her thought leadership in the field.
Have you been asked to communicate a business case steeped in data?
Do you need to keep people energized and engaged while sharing a bunch of numbers?
Are you trying to transform analytical results into information that's meaningful and gets people to make a decision and do something different?
It's not enough to wrap graphics and fancy data visualizations around data and deliver them in a dashboard, report, or PowerPoint presentation. All data has a voice. How do you get it to speak? To be heard? And to motivate people to do something different?
First, you need to extrapolate meaning from data. Then you must transform this meaning - these insights - into compelling stories that move people to shift their thinking and change their behavior. Learn what's needed to transform data to more easily get your point across - get decisions made faster - and spark action.
Lori Silverman invites you to watch her short video about this workshop:
By attending this workshop, you will be better able to:
- Outline the decision/problem the data is answering in a way that resonates with stakeholders’ business needs
- Identify the contextual questions that need to be asked to move team members and stakeholders from data to insight
- Uncover three different types of insights within data from the observations that present themselves
- Strategize how to best relay insights to others to more quickly spark a decision and action
Getting to the Essence: How to Get to the 'What' Beyond the 'Who' and 'How'
A half-day workshop with Alec Sharp (Senior Consultant, Clariteq Systems Consulting):
The half-day workshop "Getting to the Essence" by Alec Sharp offers business analysts practical and proven techniques for focusing on the what first (the events, entities, activities, processes), rather than on the who and how. Backed by so many real-life examples, this is going to be a very worthwhile workshop on business-oriented hashtag#businessanalysis. See you in Brussels ?
In his landmark article, 'No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering', Fred Brooks made the point that business analysis will always be challenging. Why? Because it's relatively easy to describe the 'who' and 'how' of the current state – this person does something using that tool, then that person does something using another tool, and so on.
What's difficult – often very difficult – is figuring out what is actually being accomplished. And that makes building a useful future state almost impossible. Sometimes, our business clients are so immersed in their job and how they do it they've literally lost sight of what is really being done. That's why the speaker has concluded, after more than 35 years of business analysis, a fundamental ability of great BAs is separating the 'what' from the 'who', 'how', and 'why'.
Backed up by numerous real-life examples, this tutorial will provide practical techniques and frameworks for getting to the essence in a variety of business analysis challenges.
Alec explains what to expect from this workshop in a short video:
Key learning points include demonstrating how getting to the essence helps by:
- Keeping people from diving into unhelpful detail while analyzing the "as-is" state
- Making your use cases / user stories more useful, and not drifting into the Useless Case" zone
- Ensuring evaluation and selection of purchased solutions ("COTS") is focused on "what" must be provided to support the business
- Freeing people from barnacle-like attachment to the current state during organisational or process change initiatives
Who presents these workshops ?
These workshops are presented by Lori Silverman and Alec Sharp.
Lori has helped firms like McDonalds, Target, GE, and Phillips North America strategize about their future and navigate messy, complex changes. She keynoted at more than 80 events and inspired thousands to take action.
Alec has deep expertise in a rare combination of fields - business process analysis and redesign, strategy development, application requirements specification, and data modelling. His 35 years of hands-on consulting experience, practical approaches, and global reputation in model-driven methods have made him a sought-after resource around the world.
If you don't know BA & Beyond yet, read this:
BA & Beyond aims to be the catalyst for bringing Business Analysis (BA) expertise together and moving the BA profession forward. Visit the BA & Beyond Web site to learn more and join our mailing list.
The Third Belgian BA Conference in Brussels is a conference for business analysts by business analysts, with approximately 25 interesting presentations in total, various workshops, side tracks and a dedicated BA tools & techniques exhibition. The first edition in 2018 had 120 participants, the second one in 2019 had 235 participants, and we are looking forward to gather over 300 people on March 26th, 2020 in Brussels. To accomplish this, we have a high-quality programme, we maintain a low entrance fee (thanks to our sponsors), and we focus on modern and applied business analysis.
Our participants are business analysts, business architects, process improvers, solution designers, project managers, change managers, ... Most of them are from Belgium and the Netherlands, but because the conference is entirely in English, we also get people from other European countries. In 2019, we had participants and speakers from 16 different countries !
Like last year, we have a pre-conference workshop day with several experts on the day before the big conference in Brussels. Lori Silverman and Alec Sharp present half-day workshops on "Facts Tell, Stories Sell" and "Getting to the Essence", and Karen Peirens presents a full-day workshop on facilitation skills.
To stay informed about BA & Beyond, you can sign up for their dedicated low-volume newsletter:
Full Programme
Facts Tell, Stories Sell: Moving From Data to Decision and Action
Our half-day workshop with Lori Silverman (Shift Strategist, Founder and CEO, Partners for Progress®):
Companies are spending huge amounts of time, energy and money on collecting, cleaning, analysing and reporting on data, without having an overall process to turn this data into new insights, insights into good decisions, and decisions into meaningful actions.
Lori Silverman will present a collaborative step-by-step approach for doing this correctly in her workshop on March 25th in Brussels.
Lori is the author of 3 books: "Stories Trainers Tell", "Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over, and "Business Storytelling for Dummies". With her third bestseller, she really solidified her thought leadership in the field.
Have you been asked to communicate a business case steeped in data?
Do you need to keep people energized and engaged while sharing a bunch of numbers?
Are you trying to transform analytical results into information that's meaningful and gets people to make a decision and do something different?
It's not enough to wrap graphics and fancy data visualizations around data and deliver them in a dashboard, report, or PowerPoint presentation. All data has a voice. How do you get it to speak? To be heard? And to motivate people to do something different?
First, you need to extrapolate meaning from data. Then you must transform this meaning - these insights - into compelling stories that move people to shift their thinking and change their behavior. Learn what's needed to transform data to more easily get your point across - get decisions made faster - and spark action.
Lori Silverman invites you to watch her short video about this workshop:
By attending this workshop, you will be better able to:
- Outline the decision/problem the data is answering in a way that resonates with stakeholders’ business needs
- Identify the contextual questions that need to be asked to move team members and stakeholders from data to insight
- Uncover three different types of insights within data from the observations that present themselves
- Strategize how to best relay insights to others to more quickly spark a decision and action
Getting to the Essence: How to Get to the 'What' Beyond the 'Who' and 'How'
A half-day workshop with Alec Sharp (Senior Consultant, Clariteq Systems Consulting):
The half-day workshop "Getting to the Essence" by Alec Sharp offers business analysts practical and proven techniques for focusing on the what first (the events, entities, activities, processes), rather than on the who and how. Backed by so many real-life examples, this is going to be a very worthwhile workshop on business-oriented hashtag#businessanalysis. See you in Brussels ?
In his landmark article, 'No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering', Fred Brooks made the point that business analysis will always be challenging. Why? Because it's relatively easy to describe the 'who' and 'how' of the current state – this person does something using that tool, then that person does something using another tool, and so on.
What's difficult – often very difficult – is figuring out what is actually being accomplished. And that makes building a useful future state almost impossible. Sometimes, our business clients are so immersed in their job and how they do it they've literally lost sight of what is really being done. That's why the speaker has concluded, after more than 35 years of business analysis, a fundamental ability of great BAs is separating the 'what' from the 'who', 'how', and 'why'.
Backed up by numerous real-life examples, this tutorial will provide practical techniques and frameworks for getting to the essence in a variety of business analysis challenges.
Alec explains what to expect from this workshop in a short video:
Key learning points include demonstrating how getting to the essence helps by:
- Keeping people from diving into unhelpful detail while analyzing the "as-is" state
- Making your use cases / user stories more useful, and not drifting into the Useless Case" zone
- Ensuring evaluation and selection of purchased solutions ("COTS") is focused on "what" must be provided to support the business
- Freeing people from barnacle-like attachment to the current state during organisational or process change initiatives
Who presents these workshops ?
These workshops are presented by Lori Silverman and Alec Sharp.
Lori has helped firms like McDonalds, Target, GE, and Phillips North America strategize about their future and navigate messy, complex changes. She keynoted at more than 80 events and inspired thousands to take action.
Alec has deep expertise in a rare combination of fields - business process analysis and redesign, strategy development, application requirements specification, and data modelling. His 35 years of hands-on consulting experience, practical approaches, and global reputation in model-driven methods have made him a sought-after resource around the world.
Workshop timing
Speakers
Lori Silverman is Shift Strategist, Founder and CEO of Partners for Progress®. She is also Adjunct Professor at Golden Gate University.
When radio/TV hosts interviewed Lori Silverman about her book, Stories Trainers Tell, they'd ask: "Can story be used for more than training?" Her next book, Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over, highlights the findings. With her third bestseller, Business Storytelling for Dummies, she solidified her thought leadership in the field. One chapter became a unique framework for transforming data into insight and action. This combined with earlier consulting experiences with Chevron, Valmet, and the U.S. Air Force, grew her prominence in data literacy.
As the Shift Strategist, over 30 years, Lori has helped firms like McDonalds, Target, GE, and Phillips North America strategize about their future and navigate messy, complex changes. Keynoting at more than 80 events, she's inspired thousands to take action. Lori is also an adjunct professor in Golden Gate University's Industrial and Organizational Psychology Master's program.
Alec Sharp is a Senior Consultant with Clariteq Systems Consulting.
He has deep expertise in a rare combination of fields - business process analysis and redesign, strategy development, application requirements specification, and data modelling. His 35 years of hands-on consulting experience, practical approaches, and global reputation in model-driven methods have made him a sought-after resource in locations as diverse as Ireland, Illinois, and India. He is also a popular conference speaker, mixing content and insight with irreverence and humor. Among his many top-rated presentations are "The Lost Art of Conceptual Modeling", "Modelling Failure", "Getting Traction for 'Process' - What the Experts Forget", and "Mind the Gap! - Integrating Process, Data, and Requirements Modeling".
Alec wrote the book on business process modeling - he is the author of "Workflow Modeling: Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development - second edition". Popular with process improvement professionals, business analysts, and consultants, it is consistently a top-selling title on business process modeling, and is widely used as an MBA textbook. The completely rewritten second edition was published in 2009, and has a "5 star" Amazon.com rating. Alec was also the sole recipient of DAMA's 2010 Professional Achievement Award, a global award for contributions to the Data Management field.
Alec's popular workshops on Working With Business Processes, Data Modeling (introductory and advanced), Requirements Modelling (with Use Cases and Business Services), and Essentials of Facilitation and are conducted at many of the world's best-known organizations. His classes are practical, energetic, and fun, with a most common participant comment being "best course I've ever taken".
Questions about this ? Interested but you can't attend ? Send us an email !