Watch out Agile and Scrum are about

1. Classification: Public
IIBA UK North Branch
Virtual Event – 27th April 2021
Jo Solecki
Senior Business Analyst
Vice Chair - IIBA UK Chapter - North Branch
@UKIIBA #UKIIBA
IIBA UK North Branch LinkedIn group
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/5168049/
IIBA UK LinkedIn group
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/55932/
United Kingdom
Chapter

2. Watch out!
Agile &
Scrum are
about
Lessons from a BA
switching to working
within an Agile
framework.

3. What we’ll be talking about
Todays session:
• A brief history on where Skipton Building Society was and why we changed the way we worked
• The hub structures, the frameworks used and the responsibilities of the BA
• Open Poll and results
• Our experience and key tips
• A round table discussion covering our change hubs and the experience of each BA
• Q&A

4. 2019 March 2021
Mortgages
Savings
March 2020
October 2019
Financial
Advice
Scrum
General
Change
April 2021
Agile 1yr
The Future
Tech Hub
Workforce
of the
Future
Change the environment
Training & familiarisation
Organisation
wide
Agile Working

5. Hub Involvement

6. The role of the BA within the Hubs
Defines and agrees Mission and Objectives
Translates into stories (deliverables)
Hub Product Owner
Leadership and voice of the
business and customer
Business Analyst
Supports with detailed User
Stories and acceptance Criteria
Demand Leads
Working across the business to
understand and shape demand
▪ Works across business lines and hubs to
facilitate and challenge to ensure the right
objectives are set for delivery
▪ Ensure company and area strategy is
incorporated into objectives
▪ Supports the business in researching
potential initiatives
▪ Facilitates the process from idea through
to approval
▪ Leverages data and customer insight to
ensure the most impactful objectives are
developed
▪ Responsible for amending the Hub mission
statement and gaining approval via
prioritization
▪ Ensure CX central to definition of
objectives and stories
▪ Works with Demand Mgt to translate objectives
into high level capability roadmaps
▪ Ownership of ROI delivery (Project manager will
report on costs across the Hub)
▪ Facilitates the process of translating approved
objectives into logical business groupings– e.g.
epics and stories
▪ Responsible for the creation and documentation
of Epics
▪ Manages priorities within the Hub – leads the
management of the product backlog process
▪ Communicates delivery roadmap and release
schedule to stakeholders
▪ Communicates Epics to BA team for creation of
stories and tickets
▪ Sign-off of Stories – see later
▪ Responsible for the creation of user stories
▪ Utilises deep business and technical knowledge
to inform user stories
▪ Documents relevant material in the Initiative and
ensures this is configured in a way which
supports future work
▪ Writes acceptance criteria
▪ Will sometimes write tickets, but this is a Hub
decision and will depend on the initiative

7. High Quality User Stories
"I" ndependent (of all others)
"N" egotiable (not a specific contract for features)
"V" aluable (to the user)
"E" stimatable (to a good approximation)
"S" mall (so as to fit within an iteration)
"T" estable (in principle, even if there isn't a test for it yet)

8. 8
Quick Poll
What do you think the potential pitfalls are when switching
to working with an agile framework?
Are there any that standout from an analysis perspective?

9. 9
What was our experience? Early days (months 1 to 6)
Storming and forming as a team
No product Owner
Knowledge of people at different
stages
Full picture understood with heavy
documentation
People weren't used to deciding on
what to work on next
People were uncomfortable with not knowing the full
facts
Some people were unfamiliar with the
techniques being introduced, this
made them uncomfortable
Story Slicing
(in its infancy)

10. 10
What was our experience? Where are we now?
We have sub scrums under the same value
stream
Assigned product owner
Knowledge sharing and learning is
engrained in the way we work
(LnD every 2 weeks, with the BA
regularlry sharing techniques)
Document just enough so that the
team can estimate it
People are empowered
(to pull the right work into the sprint
next)
We’re ok with not knowing the full answers
(we’ll work it out along the way)
We tailor documentation for what's
needed at the time
Started to introduce other frameworks to
manage work

11. 11
Hub BA Experiences
Sarah
(Mortgages Hub BA)
Speaker 1
Sam
(Savings Hub BA)
Speaker 2
Chris
(General Change Hub DL,
PO, BA)
Speaker 3

12. 12
Thank you
Q&A
?