Bold Leadership for a Dynamic BA World

Discover the 2026 BA Leadership Summit program—an agenda designed to equip Business Analysis leaders with practical insights and strategic perspectives. Explore session overviews and speaker profiles showcasing the expertise shaping this year’s summit.

Registration: 8:00am - 9:00am

Session 1: 9:00am - 10:30am

Welcome

Delvin Fletcher joined IIBA as President and Chief Executive Officer to lead our dynamic, growing, global organisation in January, 2020.

Delvin comes to IIBA most recently from Chartered Professional Accountants of Ontario where he was CIO and led digital transformation in a complex membership and regulatory not-for-profit with. He spent his early professional years with KPMG Management Consulting serving on strategy, marketing, technology and operations projects in North America and EMEA. He has served in leadership roles with both multinationals and high growth privately held companies, including SAP and Shred-it International as well as entrepreneurial ventures, interim leadership roles and not-for-profit organizations, including Ethoca Limited, where he was CIO and Xchange Technology Group where he was COO responsible for global IT, HR, operations and professional services.

Designing for Excellence in Business Analysis 

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Business analysis leaders are often held accountable for outcomes they don’t fully control—consistency, quality, and impact across teams. Too often, excellence shows up unevenly, driven either by individual capability or extraordinary effort rather than by design. 

This session offers leaders a way to reflect on how excellence is currently being shaped within their organizations. Rather than proposing a new model or set of controls, our conversation will focus on three elements that actually influence outcomes. We’ll examine common antipatterns that emerge when these elements evolve by default—and consider a central leadership question: do you have the elements in place to help your talent succeed, or are you relying on individual effort and luck to carry the load? 

Susan Moore is the Senior Community Engagement Manager at IIBA. Before joining IIBA, she spent over 20 years as a business analysis professional in finance, insurance, and utilities, working in both the business and technology.  

She holds IIBA’s Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) and Agile Analysis Certification (AAC), along with a few more business analysis and agile certifications. 

Susan is the host of IIBA’s podcast, Business Analysis Live!, where she chats with business analysis professionals from around the world on their insights and experiences. When she’s not immersed in all things business analysis, you’ll find Susan dancing, traveling, or cheering on her alma mater, the University of North Carolina.  

Susan is travelling all the way from the USA to deliver this opening keynote in Sydney!

Custodians of the Operating Model - The BA Leader’s Moment

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Enterprise AI adoption risks following a familiar and dangerous pattern: technology arrives, vendors pitch, pilots launch, and the business scrambles to catch up. We have seen this before. And like before, the risk is that we automate noise, accelerate friction, and embed misunderstanding at scale. 
 
The antidote is clarity, a rigorous, business-led understanding of how the enterprise actually operates, where the real frictions are, and which of those frictions are genuinely suited to agentic enablement.
 
That clarity does not come from IT. It lives — or it should live — in the BA practice.
 
As white-collar roles converge and the boundary between analysis, architecture, and AI enablement collapses, BA leaders face a defining choice: step into custodianship of enterprise operating knowledge, or watch that space get claimed by someone else.
 
This session, with Terry Roach, Damian Wilson, and Astrid Ries, makes the case for stepping up, unpacking what this expanded role demands, what it enables, and how to lead your team through the transition.

Dr Terry Roach is Chair of the IIBA Global Board of Directors where he has served as a director since 2020. He is founder and CEO of PlausibleBA, a software platform leveraging business architecture for planning and governing, enterprise enablement of Agentic-AI.  Previously, Terry founded and developed Capsifi, an innovative business architecture platform that was acquired by Orbus Software in 2024.

Terry is a passionate advocate, academic researcher and recognised thought leader in business modelling and AI governance. He holds an honorary research fellowship at the University of Technology in Sydney where he supervises PhD research in AI-enabled business modelling.

Morning Tea & Networking: 10:30am - 11:00am

Session 2: 11:00am - 12:15pm

Pipeline Disruption: Who Is Building the Next Generation of Business Analysts?

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AI is quietly undermining the pipeline that develops future business analysts. As AI automates routine, entry-level tasks, the apprenticeship opportunities through which early-career analysts traditionally build judgement and experience are disappearing. The business analysis profession — still young and without the deeply embedded development pathways of more mature disciplines — is particularly vulnerable. This interactive session challenges leaders to examine whether their AI adoption strategies are unintentionally making the profession irrelevant. Presenters Hayden McDonald and Niall Clerkin will explore how organisations can redesign roles, co-design capability pathways with universities, and shift from reactive to intentional talent development before inevitable task reduction takes hold.

Associate Professor Hayden McDonald is an academic leader, researcher, and industry advisor specialising in analytics. As Director of Torrens University’s award-winning Analytics programs, he has led the development of innovative, industry-integrated curricula in collaboration with global organisations. Dr McDonald has secured external research funding and published widely in leading academic journals. A Fellow of CPA Australia, he combines scholarly expertise with commercial experience gained from senior analyst roles and has advised hundreds of organisations worldwide on data-driven strategy and decision-making.
Niall Clerkin is a Change Manager with a focus on business readiness. He helps teams and workplaces build community that is both culturally sound and delivery focused. With a background in HR and Talent, and experience across organisational design and change, he helps organisations turn evidence into action through practical  transformation strategies and outcome driven engagements. An accomplished facilitator, Niall has also curated multiple TEDx events, served as MC for FoBA 2025 and other major leadership forums. He has worked with notable companies such as HCF, Atlassian, the ASX and Intel.
 
'Great work doesn’t happen by accident—it happens when people feel connected, capable, and clear about what matters'

From Insight to Impact: Building High-Performing BA Teams

How the eHealth Queensland Case Study Led to the Ability Accelerator

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In this session, Haydn Thomas shares the real-world story behind Mindavation's partnership with eHealth Queensland's Delivery Services Branch. It’s a case study that challenged conventional training models, had incredible success in terms of the organisation’s people development prowess and staff retention.

You'll walk away with practical insights into a coaching and people development model that is uniquely designed for busy, time-poor BA teams: one that achieves lasting competency shifts without losing staff to days of off-site training.

Haydn Thomas is a Principal Coach and Facilitator at Mindavation with extensive experience designing and delivering strengths-based coaching and people development programs for business analysis and project delivery teams across Australia.
 
Having delivered over 100 keynote presentations in Australia and around the world, and with over 25 years of experience empowering project teams across nine countries, Haydn is renowned for his high-energy, interactive presentation style that challenges audiences to leverage their unique strengths.
 
See why participants in eHealth Queensland’s project and BA practice reported genuine confidence shifts and a renewed ability to think differently about their work.
 

Lunch & Networking: 12:15pm - 1:15pm

Session 3: 1:15pm - 2:45pm

Build an AI Business Analyst - Live

A Hands-On Workshop for BA Practice Leaders

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AI is already reshaping how organisations gather insight, define requirements, and support decision-making. For BA leaders, the question is no longer whether AI will affect the profession, but how quickly their practice can adapt and lead.

In this interactive, bring-your-own-device workshop, BA Practice Leaders will design and build a working AI-enabled Business Analyst live.

Rather than focusing on prompts or generic AI use, this session explores how AI can be embedded into core Business Analysis activities, including requirements analysis, gap identification, stakeholder insight synthesis, and executive-ready outputs.

Participants will configure a practical AI-powered BA assistant that can be deployed immediately within their teams to improve consistency, accelerate analysis, and elevate the quality of insight delivered to stakeholders.

Designed specifically for leaders responsible for capability, standards, and practice uplift, this workshop gives participants both a practical asset and a clearer pathway towards building an AI-Native BA function.

You will leave with:

  • A working AI Business Analyst framework
  • A reusable template you can trial immediately within your practice
  • A clearer understanding of how AI reshapes the BA value proposition
  • Practical insight into leading responsible AI adoption within your team
This is not a theoretical session. It is a practical, hands-on experience designed to help BA leaders move from curiosity to capability and position their practice as AI-ready.

Mike Boutel is an executive leader, facilitator, speaker, and thought leader with more than 20 years of experience across business leadership and management, training, coaching, and major project delivery. He has supported the upskilling and certification of over 15,000 professionals each year across project, change, and agile ways of working, helping individuals and organisations unlock measurable performance improvements.

As one of the world’s first accredited AI-native trainers, Mike specialises in applying AI in practical, commercially valuable ways. His focus is not theory, but real workflows, automation, productivity gains, and tangible outcomes. He collaborates with global bodies including Scaled Agile and PeopleCert to deliver AI-powered capability uplift across Australia and internationally.

Mike’s career has been built on identifying emerging opportunities early, responding with agility, and leading teams through change. He combines deep industry expertise with entrepreneurial drive and a customer-first mindset.

His mission is simple: help people work smarter, think differently, and achieve more through AI.

Laetitia Callegari is an international consultant and thought leader in project management, future skills development, and agile leadership.

Laetitia founded her consulting and advisory firm in 2016. Her work spans multiple continents and industries, supporting organisations at the intersection of technology, human capability, and leadership transformation. Her approach blends innovative education strategy with practical project delivery, grounded in a strong commitment to human-centred leadership.

Over two decades, she has explored the integration of artificial intelligence, human behaviour, and leadership practice. Laetitia is widely recognised for translating complex technological change into practical, emotionally intelligent leadership frameworks that prepare organisations and learners for the future of work.

Afternoon Tea & Networking: 2:45pm - 3:15pm

Session 4: 3:15pm - 5:00pm

The Modern Change Engine: How Business Architecture, Transformation Leadership & Consulting Can Power Tomorrow’s Organisations

A powerhouse panel conversation with leaders in business architecture, transformation, consulting and BA practice. Discover how today’s Business Analysts become the modern engines of change — connecting strategy, people and execution like never before

Featuring: Michael W McLean, Dr Sue Craig, Dr Terry Roach & Susan Moore

 

 

Cocktail Hour & Networking: 5:00pm - 6:00pm