Live Webinar – March 16th, 2016 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT
Offered by IAG Consulting (REP 2858)
Duration 1 hour 1 PDU or  1 CDU 1 Category A – Free PDU

Enterprise Business Architecture is quickly evolving into a mainstream business capability.

Some would argue that it is already there particularly when 50% of the world’s top performing organizations have embraced business architecture as a strategic differentiator ranging from Government, Telco’s, Manufacturing and Financial Institutions.

However there continues to be a large population of change executives, managers and resources who regard Business Architecture as a theoretical practice.

Strategic change initiatives proliferate in business today. The speed and rate of change demands we maintain holistic oversight of all the moving parts to ensure realization of target operating models and designs.

Historically only a few strategic programs would be at play. In the last decade this number has grown to include on-shoring/off-shoring, centralization, spans of control, business transformation, vendor outsourcing, modernization, mergers/acquisitions, channel optimization, client segmentation, journeys and experience.

To facilitate strategic alignment and execution of these initiatives, firms are investing in business architecture.

Beyond Theory will focus on what are the market and internal forces at work which have been driving and will continue to drive organizations to use the models to better understand business impact, scope, execution and benefits realization.

The discussion will address the deployment and adoption challenges and look at industry standards and Blueprinting for strategic opportunities. It will provide a foundational knowledge of the business architecture framework and model types to crystalize scope, identify stakeholders, manage risk and how early analysis, through the lens of the business architecture, will influence estimating, resourcing, time, cost and quality.

Business Architecture is the link between strategy and execution.

Learning Objectives:

1. Provide clear, rational reasons to do business Architecture.
2. Present a foundational set of Business Architecture Models, views and uses to mitigate project and analysis risk, drive the value proposition
3. Recommend a staged Execution Model

Click to register for:
Business Architecture: Beyond Theory

Live Webinar – March 10th 2016, 12:00-1:00 PM EST
Offered by ASPE (REP 2161) 1 Category A PDU – Free PDU
Note: ASPE has  Re-branded as Techtown  – ASPE is an REP and attendees  will be awarded 1 PDU for this event.

Is There Pain In Your Tech Plan?

•  Are new software releases large, epic events which cause anxiety, or even dread?
• Are your IT operations teams overworked, grumpy, and constantly defensive because they get blamed every time something breaks?
• Is your change management department uniformly disliked and viewed as a wet blanket on value creation?

These conditions are common, but we know that some companies have overcome them to astonishing effect: technology leaders (think Netflix, Etsy, Tesla, Amazon) have achieved mythical levels of collaboration and continuous value delivery.

But what about the rest of us?

For every mythical story you hear about, there are a thousand companies whose technology teams struggle with the complexity and competing incentives of today’s rapidly changing business conditions.

Join Chris Knotts, PMP – (LinkedIn profile) for a one-hour presentation in which we examine the tricky tensions between technology, people, large organizations, and the need to find creative channels for delivering value to your customers.

Chris will discuss:

• An editorial look at today’s IT landscape
• The role of the DevOps movement
• Value, creativity, engineering and software delivery
• Horses and unicorns
• Can engineers be creative?
• Can big companies be creative?
• The practical application of Lean and DevOps principles

Click to register for:
Creativity, Engineering & Unicorns 101

Live Webinar – February 29th 2016, 12:00-1:00 PM EST
Offered by ASPE (REP 2161) 1 Category A PDU – Free PDU
Note: ASPE has  Re-branded as Techtown  – ASPE is an REP and attendees  will be awarded 1 PDU for this event – More information will be available at the session.

BA’s Stakeholders In DevOps

With the application of DevOps management principles impacting entire enterprise IT departments, it is important for the BA to understand who the stakeholders are in a DevOps-style project and how they map to the stakeholder profiles described in the BABOK.

In this short session Chris Knotts, PMP – (LinkedIn profile)  will explain the contemporary roles of the various stakeholders one might find along the way on projects which espouse the principles of DevOps.

Click to register for:
Mapping the BA’s Stakeholders in a DevOps Workflow

Live Webinar – March 2nd 2016 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EST
Offered by IAG Consulting (REP 2858)
Duration 1 hour 1 PDU or 1 CDU 1 Category A – Free PDU

Improving organizational Requirements Maturity is a strategic approach to improving project success and aligning IT with the business to meet objectives on time and on budget consistently.

According to the recent IAG BA Benchmark study of 437 large and medium organizations in North America and Europe, the organizational level of Requirements Maturity is directly proportional to the likelihood of project success.

Companies invest millions of dollars in recruitment, hiring, and training of Business Analysts every year without a detailed understanding of the role and how to integrate into the enterprise; the average Requirements Maturity level in North America is only 1.8 on a scale of 1-5, and only a fraction of those measured qualified at a level 3 or higher.

For individual and organizations that are serious about improving in a consistent and measurable way, IAG will explain the key concepts and results you can expect by improving organizational Requirements Maturity

Learning Objectives:

1. The impact of requirements maturity on overall business and project objectives.
2. The Requirements Maturity Model.
3. A high level roadmap to improving requirements capabilities.

Click to register for:
Managing Requirements Maturity

Live Webinar – March 1st, 2015 – 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST
Offered by BATimes (Diversified Business Communications REP 1811)
Duration 1 Hr  1 Cat A PDU/CDUs – Free  PDU / CDU

Agile Business Analysis – It’s coming to a team near you!

Or maybe you are already on a team as an Agile BA?

Angela and Ryland will answer your Agile BA questions and offer some nuggets .

Discuss Agile BA Topics like:

• What are the common challenges of an Agile BA?
• What’s my role with the Product Owner?
• Can I use my known BA techniques, or is it just User Stories?
• Do I work on multiple teams and project? Waterfall and Agile?
• Is there a middle ground? Sort of Agile BA?

Come listen in, ask questions, and discover more about being an agile BA.

Course Learning Objectives Include:

• Learn what are the common challenges of an Agile BA
• Discover the relationship the BA has with Product Owners
• Learn techniques to use as an Agile BA

With the Course You Will Receive:

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

Presenters:

Ryland Leyton (LinkedIn profile) author of The Agile Business Analyst: Moving from Waterfall to Agile is a CBAP & consultant with Slalom Consulting;  an agile coach for the Atlanta IIBA nonprofit volunteer program and a frequent presenter at industry conferences. In the early part of his career, Ryland worked with strongly waterfall organizations & understands first hand the challenges of moving waterfall to agile. Ryland enjoys offering presentations & educational experiences teaching others to make the shift from waterfall to Agile principles.

Angela Wick (LinkedIn profile @WickAng) After more than 15 years of consulting, mentoring and teaching, Angela knows that great BAs transform organizations. Angela encourages BAs to be agents of change. She helps BAs develop the skills they need to inspire collaboration, creativity and innovation. Get free BA tips and trends by following Angela on Twitter  or by visiting AngelaWick.com.

Click to register for:
Agile BA Panel With Angela Wick & Ryland Leyton

Live Webinar March 1st 2016 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM EST
Duration: 4 Hours Credits: 4 PDU Category C Free
Presented by : O’Reilly

 This Session Has 4 Hours Of Strategic Approaches!

This online conference dives into four key tracks from the upcoming O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference (April 10—14, New York Hilton Midtown, NY).

Join four seasoned software architects as they recount larger-than-life architectural challenges and share their strategies and solutions for dealing with them.

Covering microservices, integration architecture, reactive and its variants, security, and much more, this online conference will arm you with new strategies and practical approaches for coping with difficult real-world problems.

Zen Of Architecture

For the beginner architect, there are many options for doing pretty much anything. But for the Master architect, there are only a few.

In this information-filled session Juval will:

• Explain his approach to large system analysis and design, using volatility to decompose a system into its comprising services.
• Contrast it with the most common mistake in architecture: using functionality to identify services.
• Show how to overcome:
  • the real hurdles architects face pursuing volatility-based decomposing,
  • simple and practical techniques for identifying areas of volatility,
  • common telltale signs or “smells” when your design is still functional.

Presenter: Juval Lowy (O’Reilly bio) is founder of IDesign, a master software architect specializing in system and project design and iMicrosoft’s Regional Director for the Silicon Valley. Juval is the author of COM and .NET Component Services (O’Reilly Windows) & Programming WCF Services: Mastering WCF and the Azure AppFabric Service Bus. He participated in the Microsoft internal strategic design reviews for C#, WCF and related technologies. Juval is a frequent keynote speaker. Microsoft has ecognized Juval as a Software Legend as one of the world’s top experts and industry leaders.

Monolith To Microservices Isn’t Easy

Over 40 billion ads are served automatically each day on the AppNexus platform based on rules set up by clients through the API.

The breadth and depth of its features has caused the API to grow into a vast monolithic application.

Migrating from an application of this size to a microservices architecture presents a complex array of challenges—consistency is crucial and mishandling a client’s update can cost millions of dollars in a matter of minutes.

In this presentation, Larry will discuss the complexities of such a migration using real-world examples.

Larry will also share the open source software his team used along with the tools and processes they created to make such a change possible.

Presenter: Larry (Lawrence) Finn (LinkedIn profile) is a principal engineer at Appnexus. Studying computer science at Columbia University he spent a few years in the trenches of financial technology working on equities trading technologies. Lawrence has participated in growing the company from a fledgling startup to a technology powerhouse.

Designing A Reactive Data Platform: Challenges, Patterns & Anti-Patterns

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a tremendous surge in data volume, along with an unparalleled explosion of toolsets and solutions aimed at extracting the most value from this deluge.

Integrating these different technologies in a way that makes sense to the organization is a real challenge that has trampled many experienced engineering teams.

Alex discusses these challenges—their definition, mitigation, and potential solutions—and explains what makes a good design pattern (and what doesn’t) when architecting an integrated data platform.

Alex will cover the key architectural decisions Pluralsight made as it moved from a blank slate to a fully reactive self-service platform that is able to fulfill several business use cases.

Presenter: Alex Silva (LinkedIn profile) Chief Data Architect, Pluralsight, leads the development of the company’s data infrastructure and services. Instrumental in establishing Pluralsight’s data initiative by architecting their impressive  platform. Previously Alex was a principal data engineer at Rackspace, leading  the company’s data initiative. Alex has also held senior-level engineering positions at Walt Disney World Internet Group, Pentaho, OutStart, ESPN Emerging Technologies, and Travelatro.com.  With a reputation as a passionate & pragmatic data evangelist he is seen as a big data platform guru.

How To Make Threat Modeling Work For You

Threat modeling helps you think about what could go wrong and how to prevent it.

In building software, we either skip threat modeling for secure design or we try threat modeling but can’t figure how to connect threat models to real world development and priorities.

In this presentation, you will learn practical strategies in threat modeling for secure software design and apply risk management to deal with the threats.

Presenter: Robert Hurlbut MVP (ISC)2 CSSL  (LinkedIn profile, @RobertHurlbut) is an independent software security consultant, architect, developer, and trainer through Robert Hurlbut Consulting Services.  Robert has over 20+ years of industry experience in secure coding, software architecture, and software development and has served at times as a project manager, chief architect, and director of software development for several clients. Check out Robert’s Blog, where he shares links and other useful information.

PDU Category C documentation details:
Process Groups: Planning Executing
Knowledge Areas: 4 – Integration 5 – Scope 6 – Time 8 – Quality

• 4.3 Direct and Manage Project Execution
• 5.2 Collect Requirements
• 5.3 Define Scope
• 8.1 Plan Quality

As a Category C ‘Self Directed Learning Activity’ remember to document your learning experience and its relationship to project management for your ‘PDU Audit Trail Folder’

Click to register for:
Strategic Approaches To Real-World Architectural Challenges