Honouring 2021 Global Corporate Award Winners
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IIBA Leadership Excellence in Business Analysis
IIBA recently presented this year’s Global Corporate Program award winners with a virtual awards ceremony. Each of the three organizations were selected for demonstrating a commitment to supporting the future of the profession and advocating for the importance of business analysis for improving corporate performance.
This year’s winners included AstraZeneca, United Kingdom, awarded IIBA’s Leadership Excellence in the Advancement of Professional Development in Business Analysis; North Highland Worldwide Consulting received the Leadership Excellence in Business Analysis Advocacy & Corporate Engagement award; and Commonwealth Bank of Australia was the recipient of the Leadership Excellence in the Practice of Business Analysis.
Over the past two years’ AstraZeneca has supported the business analysis profession through their ongoing commitment to the business analysis skillset, certification, and built a community of practice for their business analysis teams.
Russell Mears, Head of Business Analysis at AstraZeneca accepted the award, saying that professional development is at the heart of what AstraZeneca is about. “The biggest advantage of building our business analysis practice is challenging value …. everything we [AstraZeneca] do is about improving patient lives. Colleagues come to us with a project or a problem and by asking the question, how is this going to improve our patients’ lives…we go from there and we deliver against it,” said Mears.
North Highland, a worldwide, employee-owned management consulting firm was recognized for advocating the value and role of business analysis and supporting the involvement and engagement of their employees in their local IIBA Chapters and the global business analysis community through volunteerism and leadership opportunities. North Highland’s team are huge proponents of business analysis - just ask John Fraser III, Expert Practitioner who accepted the award for Leadership Excellence in Business Analysis Advocacy & Corporate Engagement on behalf of North Highland.
“We have over 135 members in our capability from the US to the UK ranging from junior BAs to senior practitioners,” said Fraser, adding that they kicked off their first process and capability summit last year. “Through our partnership with IIBA our team has had the opportunity to be in the forefront of industry best practice changes, and techniques as well as certifications. We build them up [our talent] with the skills and techniques they need to understand to take the next step to be an advisor for our clients. We’ve focused on this because we want to make sure our BAs are better than they were the day before. Not only has it provided value back to our client’s - people are watching what we are doing - and want to be involved in what we’re doing.”
The Leadership Excellence in the Practice of Business Analysis Award was presented to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia for consistently demonstrating effective business analysis practices within their organization by adapting, optimizing, and evolving business analysis best practices and standards and implementing tools, processes, and methodologies - all those ingredients that go into uplifting the practice to make better business capabilities.
Julie Hockey, Executive Manager, Academy for Career Excellence in Technology at Commonwealth Bank of Australia shared the honour of receiving this award saying, “This award really goes to the 700 people in our business analysis practice across the CBA [Commonwealth Bank of Australia] group and our core group of 12 chapter leads and working group members for their tireless efforts over the last 24 months; to uplift our practice and support the development of our business analysis practitioners across the group – this award is for them.”
CBA has leveraged IIBA resources to address skills gaps, “We’ve been able to align our practices and the ways that we work as well as our professional development to the different knowledge areas within the BABOK Guide which has become our Bible and our core resource we’ve used to help support us to uplift our business analysis capabilities.”
Hockey noted, “The biggest value in building and advancing business analysis capability across the group has been our ability to add value internally to our teams, our people, and to our end customers. We are at the table with our delivery teams and our partners. We’re making sure we’re getting the right outcomes every time, delivering value known to our business and our customers - that has benefits for us in the market.”
Congratulations to this year’s corporate award winners. To hear firsthand from this year’s award recipients about what they are each doing to grow their practice and provide ongoing professional development support for their teams, you can watch this year’s full ceremony on demand here.
Learn about the support and resources available through IIBA’s Corporate Program to help your organization build business analysis capabilities and drive professional development and growth.
About The Author:
Blake Heggestad is the Director of Business Development & Growth at IIBA. He is committed to fulfilling IIBA’s mission to promote Business Analysis around the world. Prior to joining IIBA, Blake was Vice President of North American Sales for Learning Tree International, a global training company for technical and key business skills. He was responsible for driving growth in key areas such as e-learning and industry certifications.