Live Webinar November 18th, 2021 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EST
Activity Type: Education – Course or Training  1 Hour  1 PDU free
Provider:  Modern Analyst

1. As a business analyst, do you manage your manager?
2. Do you know what information to provide to your manager, when to provide it and how to provide it in the best and most influential manner?
3. Are you ever in a position where you need to “manage” other people on the project or even those outside the project, even though you have no authority to do so?

In a survey of CIOs conducted a few years back, the majority mentioned some form of upward management as a contributor to their success in achieving their executive level positions.

The role of the business analyst is one in which the exercise of upward management contributes to their future success, but it is also necessary to their basic survival and success in their role.

Upward management and what we might term “sideways management”, or the management of others outside the project who are in a supervisory role, is a form of applying influence to get things done without exerting authority.

In this webinar Steven discusses the different aspects of upward and sideways management, providing tips and techniques to employ as well as pitfalls to avoid.

Presenter: Steven P. Blais, PMP, PMI-PBA (LinkedIn profile) is an author, consultant, teacher and coach  and has over 45+ years of information systems experience in technology management, consulting and marketing positions. Specializing in the design and installation of business-oriented accounting systems and databases for commercial and government clients in the distributed environment; he develops business analysis and agile processes and trains business analysts, project managers, and executive for organizations around the world.   Steven is the author of Business Analysis: Best Practices for Success (John Wiley, 2011) and co-author of Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide (PMI, 2014) and a contributor to the A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK Guide), V3 (IIBA, 2015).

Click to register for:
The Business Analyst: Managing Up & Over

NOTE: For PMI® Audit Purposes – Print Out This Post!  Take notes on this page during the presentation and also indicate the Date & Time you attended. Note any information from the presentation you found useful to your professional development and place it in your audit folder.

Excellent Session – DO NOT MISS!!

Live Webinar – November 4th, 2021 – 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EST
Activity Type: Education – Course or Training  1 Hour  1 PDU free
Provider: BATimes (Diversified Business Communications REP1811)

Experience is a powerful teacher, but it’s also slow and painful.

Software practitioners can’t afford to make every mistake others have suffered. You can compress the education and bypass much of the pain by absorbing lessons from others who have already climbed the learning curves.

Based on Karls 50+ years of software experience and 25 years of helping software teams succeed in nearly 150 organizations, the book Software Development Pearls: Lessons from Fifty Years of Software Experience presents 60 lessons you can apply to projects regardless of the application domain, technology, development lifecycle, or your role.

These pragmatic principles, perspectives, and practices cover six crucial domains of project success: requirements, design, project management, culture and teamwork, quality, and process improvement.

In this presentation Karl briefly introduces 24 of the 60 lessons and drills down into six additional lessons. Collecting such pearls of software wisdom can pay off quickly for anyone striving to build high-quality software products.

Presenter: Karl E. Wiegers (LinkedIn profile) Principal Consultant Process Impact has provided training and consulting services worldwide on many aspects of software development, management and process improvement.

Karl is the author of many books including:

• Software Requirements 2
• Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools (Best Practices)
  
• Creating a Software Engineering Culture,
• Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide
• Software Requirements
• More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice

Click to register for:
Software Development Pearls

NOTE: For PMI® Audit Purposes – Print Out This Post!  Take notes on this page during the presentation and also indicate the Date & Time you attended. Note any information from the presentation you found useful to your professional development and place it in your audit folder.

Live Webinar September 23rd, 2021 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT
Activity Type: Education – Course or Training  1 Hour  1 PDU free
Provider:  Modern Analyst

Have you ever heard of a project, perhaps one of your own, that was successful in what it delivered, but caused unexpected consequences in other parts of the organization or collateral damage on other projects?

Everyone involved in a project has the goal of completing the project on time and within budget and having the results solve the intended problem.

If the project is being executed in an agile or scrum-like manner, the focus will be on completing the backlog items within the given timebox or sprint.

Everyone is too busy focusing on the immediate results and meeting the immediate deadlines to consider the overall impacts of the work that is being done or the organizational impacts of the results of that work. And that is good, because that is the essence of tactical thinking: focus on achieving the immediate goal.

However, projects, and their results, do not exist in a vacuum and are always part of some larger system, not necessarily a computer system.

While the business analyst typically engages in some impact analysis during the problem or requirements definition stages or when assessing potential solutions, once the solution has been adopted and the project set in motion, no further thought is given to the complex system interactions of the organization and its people.

Successful projects and initiatives have someone who keeps the Big Picture in mind to ensure the results achieve their intended goals without any negative impact elsewhere in the organization. The business analyst is the primary role that must apply system thinking to the overall solution. The business analyst can also look at the entire problem and solution domain and may suggest solution alternatives that require only a change in the way people think.

In this webinar Steve will acquaint you with the fundamental concepts and principles of system thinking which you can apply at your current and future projects as well as other aspects of your work and social life.

Presenter: Steven P. Blais, PMP, PMI-PBA (LinkedIn profile) is an author, consultant, teacher and coach  and has over 45+ years of information systems experience in technology management, consulting and marketing positions. Specializing in the design and installation of business-oriented accounting systems and databases for commercial and government clients in the distributed environment; he develops business analysis and agile processes and trains business analysts, project managers, and executive for organizations around the world.   Steven is the author of Business Analysis: Best Practices for Success (John Wiley, 2011) and co-author of Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide (PMI, 2014) and a contributor to the A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK Guide), V3 (IIBA, 2015).

Click to register for:
The Business Analyst & Systems Thinking

NOTE: For PMI® Audit Purposes – Print Out This Post!  Take notes on this page during the presentation and also indicate the Date & Time you attended. Note any information from the presentation you found useful to your professional development and place it in your audit folder.

Online Webinar  – Recorded July 29 2021
Activity Type: Education – Online or Digital Media  1 PDU – Free
Provider:  Modern Analyst

All projects are tactical. And as a result, project managers are trained as tacticians, tactical thinkers.

However, all projects start as part of an overall strategy for the organization; each project is a step toward achieving one of the organization’s strategic goals. Successful projects never lose the strategic vision of which the project is a part.

Recommendations, decisions, actions taken all have to have some sense in light of the strategic impact of those decisions or actions.

Presenter: Steven P. Blais, PMP, PMI-PBA (LinkedIn profile) is an author, consultant, teacher and coach  and has over 45+ years of information systems experience in technology management, consulting and marketing positions. Specializing in the design and installation of business-oriented accounting systems and databases for commercial and government clients in the distributed environment; he develops business analysis and agile processes and trains business analysts, project managers, and executive for organizations around the world.   Steven is the author of Business Analysis: Best Practices for Success (John Wiley, 2011) and co-author of Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide (PMI, 2014) and a contributor to the A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK Guide), V3 (IIBA, 2015).

Or … Click To Watch On YouTube:
The Business Analyst & Strategic Thinking

NOTE: For PMI® Audit Purposes – Print Out This Post!  Take notes on this page during the presentation and also indicate the Date & Time you attended. Note any information from the presentation you found useful to your professional development and place it in your audit folder.

Live Webinar August 13th 2020 – 2:00 pm – 2:30 pm EDT
Activity Type: Education – Course or Training  0 .5 Hrs  0.5 PDU free
Provider:  RBCS (REP #2986)

How many times have you heard statements like:

• “How did we miss this in test”,
• “This defect doesn’t happen on my machine”,
• “We do not need automation”, or
• “We are waiting on testing to give us the green light”?

Far too often, teams are spending a lot of time diving into discussions that they no longer need to have. This builds frustration, affects team alignment, and can potentially impact the quality and milestones of the project.Through the years, we have seen a need for processes, tools, and old–school approaches to change.

Discussions we needed to have years ago are no longer the same now.

There is a need for strategic changes in how we operate within a project and how we communicate across teams.With over 25 years of experience in IT, Mike Lyles (LinkedIn profile) has held various roles: from developer, project management office, development management, and ultimately testing.

He has witnessed the paradigm shift required to measure success on teams and the speed at which we must reach goals as compared to the past. And most importantly, he has taken part in discussions which are losing their relevancy and need a major overhaul in our workforce today.

Join the discussion, between Rex and Mike, as they discuss many of the well–known phrases, philosophies, and theories around testing of years past, and how that we must overcome the obstacles to be successful today.

Presenter: Rex Black (Amazon profile) is President of RBCS, a leader in software, hardware, and systems testing. RBCS employs the industry’s most experienced and recognized consultants, RBCS conducts product testing, builds and improves testing groups and hires testing staff for hundreds of clients worldwide. As the leader of RBCS, Rex is the most prolific author practicing in the field of software testing today.

Check Out some of Rex Black’s Great Books:

1. Foundations of Software Testing ISTQB Certification
2. Managing the Testing Process: Practical Tools and Techniques for Managing Hardware and Software Testing
3. Advanced Software Testing – Vol. 1: Guide to the ISTQB Advanced Certification as an Advanced Test Analyst (Rockynook Computing)
4. Advanced Software Testing – Vol. 2: Guide to the Istqb Advanced Certification as an Advanced Test Manager
5. Advanced Software Testing – Vol. 3: Guide to the ISTQB Advanced Certification as an Advanced Technical Test Analyst
6. Critical Testing Processes: Plan, Prepare, Perform, Perfect
7. Pragmatic Software Testing: Becoming an Effective and Efficient Test Professional
8. ISTQB Foundation Exam Preparation Guide
9. ISTQB Advanced Test Manager Exam Preparation Guide 2nd edition

Click to register for:
Discussions Testers Should No Longer Be Having

NOTE: For PMI® Audit Purposes – Print Out This Post!  Take notes on this page during the presentation and also indicate the Date & Time you attended. Note any information from the presentation you found useful to your professional development and place it in your audit folder.

Live Webinar – June 22nd, 2021- 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT
Activity Type: Education – Course or Training  1 Hour  1 PDU free
Provider: BATimes (Diversified Business Communications REP1811)

This question often comes up: “I am a project manager and our company is moving to agile or Scrum, does that mean I will now become a Scrum Master?”

In response, The answer-er hesitates and then give the unwelcomed answer of “It depends.”

And it really does depend.

1. The Scrum Master role is deep and wide.
2. Scrum Masters need to support their teams while working with the rest of the people in their organizations to build awareness and enable greater agility.
3. A Scrum Master’s job is not to manage a project or deliver status reports — duties that people associate with the role of a traditional project manager.
4. As a matter of fact, Scrum Masters may not get involved in status reports at all.

In this webinar, Eric Naiburg, (LinkedIn profile) COO, Scrum.org, will discuss the potential move to an agile way of working, the role of the Scrum Master, and what that means for people currently in the role of Project Manager.

With the Course You Will Receive:

• Access to the Live and Recorded Version of Webinar
• Personalized Certificate of Attendance
• Copy of Presentation Slides

Presenter: Eric Naiburg, Chief Operating Officer, Scrum.org &
co-author of UML for Database Design and UML for Mere Mortal. Eric is currently responsible for all aspects of marketing, support, outbound communications and operations for Scrum.org. Previously he held the role of director of marketing for INetU (now ViaWest). Before INetU, Eric was program director at IBM and Rational Software responsible for application lifecycle management (ALM), DevOps and Agile solutions Eric has held product management and marketing roles with other organizations including: Ivar Jacobson Consulting, CAST Software and Logic Works Inc. (Acquired by Platinum Technologies and CA), as product manager for ERwin.

Click to register for:
Should A Project Manager Become A Scrum Master?

NOTE: For PMI® Audit Purposes – Print Out This Post!  Take notes on this page during the presentation and also indicate the Date & Time you attended. Note any information from the presentation you found useful to your professional development and place it in your audit folder.