Best Case Scenarios was created by Alyson Macdonald and Randal Wilson-Jack, two business analysts who heard the phrase “bring your whole self to work” and decided to run with it.
Alyson Macdonald
Alyson is a Senior Business Analyst at Jisc, a non-profit organisation that provides digital infrastructure for the higher and further education sector. She has experience across a wide range of projects, from traditional system implementation to providing strategic BA support to Jisc’s sustainability programme.
Outside of work, she is a photographer and art student, using experimentation and hands-on techniques to work through ideas. This helps her to design workshops that use paper-based exercises to explore concepts or identify priorities. She thinks that imagination can be a valuable force in the workplace, and enjoys creating training and team-building workshops based around fictional scenarios – including one where business analysts and project managers swapped jobs for the morning to help them understand each other’s point of view.
Business analysis has also started to influence some of her creative work, including a choose-your-own adventure game written in user stories and gherkin syntax.
Randal Wilson-Jack
Randal has worked in education and technology for 16 years. He is a Senior business analyst at Jisc, a non-profit organisation providing crucial support for tertiary education with challenges in data, technology and licensing.
He has worked on a range of strategic projects including: critical security architecture remediation; delivering a data platform used by all providers of higher education in the UK; shared service desk across sector agencies; digital licensing platform; and new intranet.
In his spare time he plays live action roleplaying (LARP) games, where he dresses up in silly clothes and pretends to be other people. Because of this experience, he is able to bring creative methods of engagement into his BA practice. For example, using large scale printouts to help participants collaborate on designing a new process. Or developing a Western-themed retrospective (complete with cowboy hat) to reduce tension in a tricky environment.
Acknowledgements
Best Case Scenarios only exists because of the people who have helped us along the way
We would like to thank our employer, Jisc, for giving us space to experiment, and our colleagues in the BA team for testing the scenarios.
We’re also grateful to Dave Beckham and Rachael Levermore for trusting us to run a workshop at the Business Analysis Conference Europe, which has only encouraged us further.