Dale Taft

Dale Taft, Senior principal, Mi-GSO, PCUBED

Dale is a senior principal at Mi-GSO | PCUBED and leads the firm’s Business Analysis capability; supporting the development and delivery of BA solutions across its business. An experienced digital transformation consultant and PPM professional, Dale has amassed experienced as a business architect across engineering-centric verticals and the public sector; partnering with numerous FTSE 100 firms to breakthrough performance challenges. His consulting leadership experience ranges from developing client-side data-driven decision support tools to running operating model transformations. A certified enterprise architect and chartered networks engineer, Dale carries a sharp focus for helping organisations adopt innovative approaches to harness technology-enabled solutions.

Presentation Synopsis - The project manager’s new role in decision-making (a practitioner’s refection)

As the advent of the digital era brings with it exponentially complex environments, traditional delivery approaches are superseded by the modern to give industry players the competitive edge. The shift from waterfall to agile has reflected the value of organisational flexibility and adaptability to respond to ever-changing external events. However, during this shift, the separation between ‘project manager’ and ‘business analyst’ (BA) responsibilities has endured.

When the pace of change increases, organisations experience friction in their management of initiatives - traditional BA roles and the production of BA artifacts (e.g. hefty requirements logs) take too long to support the rapid decision-making required to stay ahead. This presentation concludes that the next step change in delivery performance won’t come from ‘Agile 2.0’ and explores the power of augmenting project delivery practitioners with business analysis practices to improve the pace and quality of decision-making throughout business layers.