This presentation/workshop is about mapping the consequences of antifragility for the profession of the modern business analyst. An antifragile system or organisation has the ability to become stronger as a result of unexpected events, malfunctions and errors. In other words, 'what does not kill you, makes you stronger'. But most organisations and systems are designed to deal exclusively with known risks. And process designers and IT departments have invested heavily in preventing errors. What would happen if you designed a system while assuming that all components can and will fail. And additionally generate random failures to test the resilience of the system. The Chaos Monkey, designed by Netflix, is one of the best - technical - examples in this field. What does this approach mean for business analysis, for the 6 BABOK areas and especially for Strategy Analysis and Solution Evaluation? After all, how antifragile should an organisation become? To what extent is an organisation prepared to invest in this? And what is technically possible at all?

1. ba-beyond.eu — #BABeyond20
13 October 2020
What can Antifragility do
for business analysts?
Jan de Vries

2. What can
Antifragility do for
business analysts?
Live online, October 13 2020, 10.15-11.00
Jan de Vries

3. Enterprise DevOps
working group
In kaart
brengen
van
Organisatie
in beweging
brengen
Product snel en
zonder waste
naar de markt
Jobs, Pains en
gains
Seeing things early
&
Connecting the
working
groups
agile scaling,
agile
Areas

4. Support Staff in
Agile/DevOps
Environments
• Agile & Control
• Lean Agile HR
• DevOps & Compliance
Smell of the
PI Planning
• Do's and don'ts
Antifragility
Coherence
Tour
• DevOps
• Business Analysis
• XP
Research, publishing
& speaking

5. Take a screenshot
• Introduction
• 3 breakout rooms
• Wrap up together
Agenda for today

8. Fragile in IT

9. Robust in IT

10. Resilient in IT

11. Antifragile

12. • Latency monkey
• Janitor monkey
• Conformity monkey
• Chaos gorilla
Antifragile in IT

14. Inoculation

15. Provoke yourself
• sleep on the floor
• Leave your home without a phone
• skip a meal
• ....
Source: Joep Dohmen

17. Asymmetry is key
Definition:
• anything that has more upside than
downside from random events / shocks
is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.
• to judge the (anti)-fragility of a system
is to ask whether it is accelerating
towards harm or benefit
Nonlinearity
1
Take a screenshot

18. Number of tasks
coordinated
in a software project
Gain
Pain
SOFTWAREPROJECTSARE FRAGILE
IT example

19. Number of
deployments
per month
Gain
Pain
CONTINUOUS
DEPLOYMENT
IS ANTIFRAGILE
IT example

20. Definition:
– an option is a contract which gives the buyer the
right, but not the obligation, to do something
Asymmetry is key
Optionality
2
– financial options are usually expensive
– non-financial options are usually free or cheap,
but.... we don't recognise them.
Take a screenshot

21. The Unicorn Club

22. If you're not embarrassed by the first version
of your product, you've launched too late
Reid Hoffman, entrepreneur
MVP's

23. AB testing
• facilitates small
experiments to a
system.
• reducing risk by
low doses
Source: Khalid Saleh

24. Asymmetry is key
Transferring fragility
Definition:
• if one party has the downside and
another party has the upside, fragility is
being transferred from one party to
another
• The reverse: skin in the game -> a person
has something to lose in a given situation
3
Take a screenshot

25. Skin in the game missing
(silo's)
SILO'SARE FRAGILIZERS

26. Source: Nijland and Berghout, 2002
Skin in the OPS game missing
(projects)
PROJECTSARE FRAGILIZERS

27. 'Any organisation that designs
a system will inevitably
produce a design whose
structure is a copy of the
organization's communication
structure'
Melvin Edward Conway, 1967
Blocked by Conway's Law

28. 'Any organisation that designs
a system will inevitably
produce a design whose
structure is a copy of the
organization's communication
structure'
Melvin Edward Conway, 1967
Leveraging Conway's Law

29. Current
Potential
The Antifragile Iceberg
Continuous deployment AB testing
Chaos engineering

31. Questions 1 of 2
• What would happen if you designed a system while
assuming that all components can and will fail?
• What does this approach mean for business
analysis, for the 6 BABOK areas and especially for
Strategy Analysis and Solution Evaluation?
• How antifragile should an organisation become? To
what extent is an organisation prepared to invest in
this? And what is technically possible at all?
Take a screenshot

32. Questions 2 of 2
• Is business analysis essentially fragile or antifragile? And how could
it be made more insensitive to change and chaos? Or could it even
be designed in such a way that it benefits from change and chaos?
• To what extent can requirements engineering and requirements
management facilitate systems and organisations to become more
antifragile? How do you recognise secure options in requirements?
Are choices dependent on an organisation's risk appetite?
• To what extent is business analysis and requirements engineering
susceptible to fragility, leading to sub optimalisation? How can this
be prevented?
• What does business analysis look like through anti-fragile eyes?
What changes could that lead to in business analysis?
Take a screenshot

33. 3 aspects in 3 breakout
rooms
1. non linearity (CI/CD, stop software projects, chaos
engineering, ........)
2. optionality (MVP's, A/B-testing, .......)
3. transferring fragility (DevOps, leverage Conway's
Law, ......)
Take a screenshot

34. To get more antifragile
Continuous deployment
DevOps
Reducing Technical Debt
Decentralised decision-making
Microservices
AB testing
Autoscaling
Focus on MTTR
Canary releases
Chaos engineering
Reducing Organisational Debt

36. research@blueoceanrecon.com