The Science of Choosing Which Dumpster Fire to Tackle First

Everything is on fire, every stakeholder is clamoring for their thing to be prioritized first, and every leader wants to know why theirs isn't. There are lots of ways to prioritize a backlog but the weighted shortest job first (WSJF) method offers ways to find the "low hanging fruit" that delivers the most value to the stakeholdes in the shortest amount of time.

Together we'll discuss the components of the technique and how to walk your stakeholders through the prioritization process. We will analyze both the strengths and limitations of this technique. Finally, we'll explore what to do when even that doesn't give you a definitive answer.

The Art of Just Enough: Practical Business Analysis for Small Businesses

Running a small business requires constant decision-making, yet many entrepreneurs lack structured methods for analyzing problems and choosing the best course of action. Without good tools, they might revert to making decisions based on instinct, leading to missed opportunities or costly mistakes.

In this session, we’ll explore how to scale down business analysis practices for maximum impact in small business environments. We’ll examine core techniques that offer big value with lower effort when resources are scarce. We’ll also discuss how to adapt them to the realities of small business decision-making.

By the end of this session, you’ll be equipped with a streamlined, high-value BA toolkit designed for small business. Whether you’re consulting, mentoring, or embedding business analysis into a small-scale operation, you’ll gain actionable insights on how to apply "just enough" business analysis.

Five Powerful Questions for Getting the Answers You Need

What is the secret to getting the type of answer you need to solve your latest challenge? Whether it is acceptance criteria, requirements gathering, coaching or knowledge sharing, getting meaningful answers to your questions can help clarify problems, opportunities and situations in your mind so that you can confidently choose your next step.

In this session, you will learn what to look for in emails, interviews, and other information gathering techniques to understand the needs and achieve better outcomes.

1) Discover flexible ways to modify the question to fit the situation
2) Identify the components of a meaningful, useful answer
3) Techniques to sleuth out meaningful answers from nonverbal information.

Thrown in the deep end - finding your footing from mid-project

Imagine you are about to be up to your eyeballs in a project you weren't around for the beginning of. Maybe you just inherited a product or code base from someone who is no longer around. The project clock is ticking, and you need to get up to speed quick.

In this session we will explore a framework of knowns and unknowns to help you identify your first critical action items:

1. Known Knowns
2. Known Unknowns
3. Unknown Knowns
4. Unknown Unknowns

This is a great session for and early to mid-career professionals who are intimidated by next-level projects, who want to get traction faster, or just haven't learned how to admit, "I don't know yet."

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint: Techniques for Change That Go the Distance

What does it take to support a multi-year, multi-national change effort—and still be standing at the finish line?

No matter your role—business analyst, product manager, change lead, or otherwise—this session provides practical tools for handling shifting priorities and organizational complexity while avoiding burnout.

Change management should be part of your initial strategy; this session will show you why and give you techniques to reduce organizational trauma during transitions.

Ideal for professionals supporting change in large or distributed environments, this session blends strategic insight with battle-tested tactics.

Project fundamentals for project teams

Your project manager has just gone on extended leave, and your boss asked you to manage it in their absence. Do you have the skills to step in and smoothly keep the project on track?

This workshop introduces a practical, shared approach to project fundamentals, focused on clarity, consistency, and follow-through rather than method.

Participants will learn how to articulate project scope and success criteria clearly, translate goals into right-sized plans, and use common language and lightweight templates to communicate progress, manage risk, and handle scope change. We emphasize defining decision authority, clarifying ambiguity, and preventing or mitigating common breakdowns that occur between planning and execution.

This session is designed for professionals who contribute to or lead project work as part of their role and who want practical tools they can immediately apply.

Allies in Change: Clarifying Role Ambiguity Between Project Management, Business Analysis and Chan

The project manager, business analysis professional, and change manager all have important but distinctly different roles to play as change agents. Yet in complex projects, the boundaries between those roles are rarely as clean as our job descriptions or professional standards suggest. Stakeholder engagement, communication, risk, requirements, readiness, adoption, and delivery can create ambiguity where responsibilities overlap. Add different professional backgrounds, expectations, and past experiences to the mix, and that overlap can become a source of interpersonal friction rather than a strength.

In this interactive session, we will explore where these three disciplines intersect, how their perspectives reinforce one another, and how to recognize when a handoff should instead become a handshake. Through practical examples and discussion, participants will consider how curiosity, intentional relationship-building, and clearer expectations can help teams navigate role ambiguity before it becomes conflict. We will also examine practical tools that can help professionals clarify how they will work together, recalibrate when needed, and combine their strengths to improve stakeholder alignment, change adoption, and project outcomes.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Recognize factors that contribute to interpersonal friction in project environments, including role ambiguity, differing expectations, and prior professional experiences.

- Compare the complementary roles of project management, business analysis, and change management in delivering successful outcomes.

- Select techniques that support thoughtful relationship building, role alignment, and sustainable change adoption.

From Search Bar to Thought Partner: Getting Real Value from AI

The gap between professionals who get genuinely useful output from the AI tools they leverage and those who get polished-sounding nonsense isn't the tool; it's the interaction. This two-hour workshop is built around an uncomfortable truth: most professionals are using AI as a search engine, not a thought partner. That approach leaves the majority of AI's analytical value on the table.

In this session, you'll spend most of your time doing, not watching. You'll rewrite weak prompts in real time and immediately see the difference in output quality. You'll run the same prompt across multiple AI tools and learn to read the results critically, because different tools are better at different things. You'll practice building a structured workspace around a feature or initiative, using notebooks and conversation folders to create something you can actually return to, build on, and share. You'll learn how to keep short-term conversations separate from long-term iterative work, and what to look for in the terms of service to protect your IP and that of your company.

By the time you leave, you'll have a personal prompting framework that works for your needs, a mental model for organizing AI-assisted work, and a clear sense of how to protect your intellectual property and that of your company. No prior AI experience required. Bring your laptop and a real initiative you're wrestling with — you'll use it. Let's dive in!

Project Management Fundamentals for Business Analysts

As a BA, your analytical skills are essential — but do you ever wonder why projects still struggle despite your best work? This workshop pulls back the curtain on what your project manager is navigating: competing stakeholder demands, resource constraints, and the invisible work of keeping a project on track. You'll walk away with a clearer picture of where your role ends and the PM's begins, practical ways to make your collaboration more effective, and the context to anticipate what your PM needs before they ask. Better projects. Less friction. More impact.

This is a 4-hour workshop format

The Credibility Equation: How Everyday Choices Shape Trust and Influence Opportunity

Credibility is one of the most valuable assets a professional can possess, yet few build it intentionally. While technical skills and domain knowledge matter, lasting credibility is earned through something deeper: consistently demonstrating competence, reliability, integrity, and sound judgment. These qualities shape the trust others place in our recommendations, decisions, and leadership, influencing everything from stakeholder relationships to career opportunities.

In this session, we'll explore the Credibility Equation, a practical framework built around competence, reliability, integrity, and judgment. We'll examine how credibility is built through everyday professional choices, reinforced through consistent delivery, and tested when projects become difficult or uncertain. Through practical examples and guided reflection, you'll learn how credibility is earned, how it can be unintentionally damaged, and how to strengthen it through deliberate professional practice.

Whether you are establishing yourself in a new role, seeking greater influence, or looking to become a trusted decision partner, this session will provide a practical framework for building the trust and confidence that underpin long-term professional success.

Attendees will learn:
1. Why credibility is a product of professional practice rather than personality, and how competence, reliability, integrity, and judgment shape the trust others place in us.
2. How everyday professional choices influence reputation, trust, and professional opportunities, often long before formal authority or expertise are recognized.
3. How to use the Credibility Equation as a practical framework for strengthening influence and becoming a trusted decision partner.

You were built for this: business analysis in an agentic AI world

Agentic AI is changing how work gets done. As organizations hand more complex tasks to AI agents, the quality of the instructions, constraints, context, rules, and success criteria behind that work matters more than ever. Business analysis professionals should see this as the opportunity of a lifetime.

The skills needed to guide effective agentic work are skills business analysis professionals already know. We clarify intent. We challenge assumptions. We define requirements, constraints, exceptions, outcomes, and success measures.

What has changed is the operating environment. Agentic AI cannot navigate ambiguity well. It cannot “read between the lines,” although it tries. Humans have filled those gaps through conversation, iteration, shared context, and short feedback loops learned through years of Agile development frameworks. Spec-driven development, though requires specificity.

This session explores why agentic AI increases, rather than decreases, the value of strong business analysis. You will connect familiar BA practices to agentic delivery and identify where stronger analysis can improve results.

Your time is now. You were made for this. You trained for this. You are READY for this

Controlled Acceleration: Governing AI at the Speed of Competition

AI creates an uncomfortable leadership mandate: move fast enough to remain competitive without automating away the expertise, judgment, and trust your organization will need tomorrow.

The risks of widespread AI use grow with the authority we give it in pursuit of productivity and speed. Leaders must decide where AI can recommend, decide, and act while managing competing pressures. Automating entry-level work may deliver immediate returns while eliminating the apprenticeship that creates future experts. Employees are being told to embrace AI while wondering whether doing so makes their own jobs disappear. Governance can create needed guardrails, yet standardizing too quickly around approved tools and uses can constrain the experimentation that produces innovation.

Leaders need a strategy for controlled acceleration.

This session explores how leaders can pursue controlled acceleration: establishing clear boundaries for AI authority, protecting the development of future expertise, and creating the organizational conditions that allow employees to adopt AI with confidence. You’ll leave better prepared to set direction, ask harder questions, and lead AI adoption at a pace your organization can sustain.

By the end of the session, participants will be able to:
1. Assess where AI should assist, recommend, or act based on the authority, consequences, and human judgment involved.
2. Recognize where AI-driven efficiency can create longer-term capability gaps, particularly when automation removes the experiences through which employees develop judgment and expertise.
3. Identify gaps in their organization’s approach to AI adoption across governance, employee readiness, and opportunities for responsible experimentation.

Key Takeaways:
1. AI risk grows with the authority we give it. Leaders need to distinguish between AI that assists, recommends, and acts when determining appropriate oversight.

2. Today’s efficiency can become tomorrow’s expertise gap. Automating entry-level work without considering how expertise develops can weaken the organization’s future talent pipeline.

3. Successful AI adoption requires controlled acceleration. Governance, employee readiness, and room for experimentation must develop alongside the technology.