WELCOME SPEECH
Hello Everyone,
I am glad to welcome you to the first BArszawa blog edition! We (OrgTeam) thought that having monthly meetups and coffee talks was not enough, so we needed something written. A place where we can share interesting thoughts and ideas and make some announcements, of course.
We aim to extend our media presence and grow our community alongside a Telegram chat, offline meetups, and coffee talks. We will experiment with the format to see whether it addresses the needs of our dearest audience.
So, let’s fix the current state:
a new edition is published every month
it will be in English, but we might reference materials in other languages
reading is for free, but we welcome your support with donations
we focus on business analysis, but there might be topics from related fields (system design, product management, etc.)
Last but not least, we encourage everyone to contribute to this blog. I am acting as a blog editor, so please feel free to contact me if you have some ideas or materials you want to share. Our OrgTeam is ready to help you with publishing.
Let’s start this journey together with announcements…
ANNOUNCEMENTS
1. Goodbye Solbeg
Unfortunately, we are no longer cooperating with Solbeg’s Warsaw office in terms of housing our meetups. But we are all very grateful for the space provided with free tea, coffee, and ice creams.
Thus, we seek a new, constant place to become our HQ. We are ready to cooperate with an IT company that is ready to host our monthly meetups and workshops dedicated to business analysis and more. So, if you can help us find such a patronage, please contact anyone from the OrgTeam (the contacts are listed below).
Meanwhile…
2. Our meetups become fee-based
We need to pay some money to rent a place for our events. We are looking for a reasonable place considering price and quality. The price may vary, depending on the place. But it will be much cheaper than an IIBA conference, I promise you.
To honor people who are attending our paid events, they will exclusively get access to meetup materials. It is pretty simple: if you visited at least one meetup, you will get materials during a calendar year whether you attended a meetup or not. We are also thinking about further benefits for our valuable members.
Coffee talks will remain free of charge forever. You just need to pay for food and drinks.
The meetups might become free again if we find a patron (some organization) to give us free space for monthly events. Another option is to launch a paid product (educational, coaching, consulting, mentoring, etc), which will allow us to cover the costs.
3. Launching the first event in 2024
Our first meetup will happen on February 3 at a new place. Mikita Bobchanka will share his experience in pre-sales. That is always a challenging topic for BAs as the pre-sales stage has its own peculiarities compared with a steady in-development project.
Moreover, the presentation will be in Belarusian, which will be the first time in our community. Here is a registration link. Hurry up! There are just a few places left.
4. The "Bridging Insights: Elicitation Techniques and Tips for BAs” workshop
A valuable member of our OrgTeam, Olga Rapoport, will conduct an online workshop about BA elicitation techniques on February 20. If you want to improve your skills as a Business Analysis professional, you definitely must attend. Here is a link with the details and how to register.
Also, Olga is hosting the Book club at the IIBA Belarus Chapter, and on January 31, they will discuss “Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects.” Here is a link to a LinkedIn event.
I really don’t know how she manages all those activities.
5. IIBA Poland Chapter BABOK Study Group
Another valuable member of our OrgTeam, Taisa Taustales, has become a tutor for the BABOK Study Group 2024 for the IIBA Poland Chapter. Don’t miss it if you want to pass the IIBA certification exams and boost your career prospects.
USEFUL MATERIALS
From Ilya:
“Death of Requirements Engineering”
That is a quote from a recent online lecture from Anatoli Levenchuk about upcoming shifts in the real sector of the economy:
There is a slide about the death of requirements engineering. And that clearly triggered me. But if you put that statement into the lecture context, it makes more sense.
It does not mean the death of business analysis as a discipline. But it will soon undergo an unprecedented change, so we might say that requirements engineering in the current state will no longer be relevant. And we know that AI plays a key role here. We just don’t know yet to what extent.
Book recommendations for future (and current) Product Managers
I have a bit of self-promotion here :) I shared my thoughts about a hidden gem among overhyped books about Product Management. Maybe because of a not-very-sexy title: "Building Products for the Enterprise: Product Management in Enterprise Software.”
That book will be relevant for those who want to become a product manager but from a bloody enterprise, not from a startup perspective. Experienced PMs might also take some valuable insights.
I recently read that book again, and it helped me see a communication gap between sales, marketing, and me. As a result, we have provided new materials for them to promote our services better (even though we are an internal platform) and established a process to keep that content up-to-date.
Link to the article to learn more about the book:
https://ilyazakharau.com/posts/reading-product-management-in-enterprise/
From Stepan:
“Yandex Taxi technologies anthology”
This is a web series from the Yandex team about technologies they used in one of the most widely used (and thus, most heavily loaded) products - Yandex Taxi. The series contains a few episodes now; each one talks about the different parts of the product. It is good content for the evening after a busy day at work, but it is still useful. The series is voiced by real actors, so the voice-over is not annoying but adds extra charm.
The last episode is about my favorite non-functional requirement - stability.
From Olga:
Thoughts from “Clear thinking” book that is now so popular among CEOs
Author: Shane Parrish
Link to Amazon (in case you’re interested)
It is commonly acknowledged that our default behavior and instincts often have significant influence over our lives and thought processes at a subconscious level. However, an intriguing idea presented in this book suggests that we have the potential to use these innate tendencies for our own benefit, for example, by creating habits or joining the groups:
💡 Joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behavior is an effective way to create an intentional environment. If you want to read more, join a book club. If you want to run more, join a running club. If you want to exercise more, hire a trainer. Your chosen environment, rather than your willpower alone, will help nudge you toward the best choices.
Dealing with people's resistance to change can be a major challenge in business analysis within companies. Knowing some basic psychology can be a handy tool to connect with people to overcome this challenge:
💡 Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely. Deviating from established practices can be painful. Who wants to try something different that might not work? We could end up losing people's respect, their friendship, and even our job if we deviate too far from the status quo without producing the right results. This is why we rarely try new approaches, and when we do, we often proceed with so much trepidation that the smallest setback sends us back to the safety blanket of conformity.
In our daily lives, we often find ourselves surrounded by people who share similar views, making it challenging to embrace different perspectives. However, in a work setting, we may encounter diverse and valid points of view. It's important to navigate these situations by understanding that sometimes we need to accommodate and collaborate, adopting approaches that differ from our own:
💡 It's easy to take comfort in the fact that other people agree with us. As legendary investor Warren Buffett pointed out, though, "The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct."
💡 The people executing established practices say they want new ideas, but they just don't want the bad ones. And because they so want to avoid the bad ones, they never deviate enough to find new good ones.
Postscriptum
I hope you enjoy our first try to do something in a written form. We value your feedback and your contribution to our Business Analysis Community in Warsaw or simply BArszawa.
We are happy to see you at our offline and related online events. If you’d like to join our Telegram chat, just contact the OrgTeam or ask your former BA colleague from a previous job to add you in. They are already there, for sure.
BArszawa OrgTeam with Love:
Cover image: Winter Vectors by Vecteezy