gescober
11-19-2007, 12:59 PM
Just got back from BA World in Chicago, and thought I'd post a report in case anybody was interested in going to one of these. This was the first time I had ever attended an analyst conference, though I've been an analyst for about 13 years now.
I signed up for all 4-days which included 2 days worth of seminars and 2 days worth of workshops. There was a networking event, which I ended up not attending, and a number of sponsors with booths. They fed us pastries and coffee for breakfast and lunch every day. Cost was around $1500 for the 4 days. Also, BA World is done in conjunction with Project Summit, a PM's conference.
The seminars were on the first two days, and were given by a mix of trainers/consultants and industry professionals. Each seminar was about an hour long, and there were two in the morning and two in the evenings. You could choose whichever seminar you wanted to attend.
In general, these were pretty good. Mostly a lecture/presentation with questions, though some had a bit of interaction. There were a couple of duds - mostly where I found the speaker uninteresting. Some were a bit too ambitious in the scope of their presentations. I was a bit surprised by the level of experience/knowledge by a number of the analyst attending. As noted, this was my first conference, so I didn't know what to expect, but I thought that analysts who did attend conferences would be pretty experienced and knowledgeable. For example, there was an Advanced Use Case techniques seminar, and the presenter asked the group to name the types of use case relationships. I was sitting at a table of around 6 analysts, and they didn't know what he was talking about, which I found very surprising. (btw, Includes, Extends, and Generalization).
The two seminars that stick out in my mind was one on non-functional requirements by Roxanne Miller and one on Data Modeling by Joy Matthews.
One of my goals was to get information from other analysts on the state of the art regarding requirements gathering - especially Agile techniques, and I found myself explaining/teaching more than learning from the other participants. So, that was a bit disappointing.
On the second day of seminars, they had an early morning session of roundtables with other analysts. Essentially, they picked a number of topics, and people would gather at tables designated with that topic for an open discussion. There would be a designated moderator at each table. We would switch tables/topics every 25 minutes. This was excellent.
The workshops were o.k. - these are all-day workshops, and there was a two-day workshop. I took one on Enterprise Analysis that was good - given by Glenn Brule who is a very good speaker. Lots of interaction and class exercises.
The second one I took was one for Senior BAs by Kitty Hass, which was good. There was quite a bit of overlap with the Enterprise Analysis workshop, so I didn't get as much out of it. It was also on the last day, so people were a bit fried and looking to get out early.
So, in general, it was pretty good. The trainer/consultants are pretty good and many of them are authors of the BABOK. They didn't do a hard sell for their services at all. If you're a fairly experienced and knowledgeable analyst, I'd read the seminar/workshop descriptions carefully and target what you want to attend. There was probably 3-days worth of conference for me out of the 4 days I attended.
I'm hoping to attend the IEEE RE conference in Barcelona next year, so it'll be an interesting comparison.
I signed up for all 4-days which included 2 days worth of seminars and 2 days worth of workshops. There was a networking event, which I ended up not attending, and a number of sponsors with booths. They fed us pastries and coffee for breakfast and lunch every day. Cost was around $1500 for the 4 days. Also, BA World is done in conjunction with Project Summit, a PM's conference.
The seminars were on the first two days, and were given by a mix of trainers/consultants and industry professionals. Each seminar was about an hour long, and there were two in the morning and two in the evenings. You could choose whichever seminar you wanted to attend.
In general, these were pretty good. Mostly a lecture/presentation with questions, though some had a bit of interaction. There were a couple of duds - mostly where I found the speaker uninteresting. Some were a bit too ambitious in the scope of their presentations. I was a bit surprised by the level of experience/knowledge by a number of the analyst attending. As noted, this was my first conference, so I didn't know what to expect, but I thought that analysts who did attend conferences would be pretty experienced and knowledgeable. For example, there was an Advanced Use Case techniques seminar, and the presenter asked the group to name the types of use case relationships. I was sitting at a table of around 6 analysts, and they didn't know what he was talking about, which I found very surprising. (btw, Includes, Extends, and Generalization).
The two seminars that stick out in my mind was one on non-functional requirements by Roxanne Miller and one on Data Modeling by Joy Matthews.
One of my goals was to get information from other analysts on the state of the art regarding requirements gathering - especially Agile techniques, and I found myself explaining/teaching more than learning from the other participants. So, that was a bit disappointing.
On the second day of seminars, they had an early morning session of roundtables with other analysts. Essentially, they picked a number of topics, and people would gather at tables designated with that topic for an open discussion. There would be a designated moderator at each table. We would switch tables/topics every 25 minutes. This was excellent.
The workshops were o.k. - these are all-day workshops, and there was a two-day workshop. I took one on Enterprise Analysis that was good - given by Glenn Brule who is a very good speaker. Lots of interaction and class exercises.
The second one I took was one for Senior BAs by Kitty Hass, which was good. There was quite a bit of overlap with the Enterprise Analysis workshop, so I didn't get as much out of it. It was also on the last day, so people were a bit fried and looking to get out early.
So, in general, it was pretty good. The trainer/consultants are pretty good and many of them are authors of the BABOK. They didn't do a hard sell for their services at all. If you're a fairly experienced and knowledgeable analyst, I'd read the seminar/workshop descriptions carefully and target what you want to attend. There was probably 3-days worth of conference for me out of the 4 days I attended.
I'm hoping to attend the IEEE RE conference in Barcelona next year, so it'll be an interesting comparison.