Events

Join us for Professional Development Days (PDD) 2025 - Data and Cyber...AI, Oh My! Education Day is May 21, 2025, and includes powerful morning and afternoon sessions on a variety of relevant topics. Symposium Day is May 22, 2025, and starts with our incredible Keynote Speaker, Vince Mirabelli. You will also have the opportunity to select four sessions from five tracks and then end the day with our dynamic Endnote Speaker, Jamie Champagne. Don't miss PDD 2025! See you at the St. Paul RiverCentre!

When you hear the word “sprint,” do you picture track spikes and a starting gun? In the business world, we’re not racing down a lane—but we are moving fast. You’ve probably heard of Working Sprints and maybe even Sprint Zero…but what about Design Sprints or Foundation Sprints? Are these just trendy buzzwords, or do they actually help teams go the distance? Join us for a high-energy session where we’ll break down the four types of sprints that every Business Analyst, Scrum Master, and Product Owner should know. Think of this as your training ground—minus the sweat. We’ll dig into what each sprint is, when to use them, and when to leave them in the locker room.

Join us for a Happy Hour with Horizontal Talent!

What does it take to have a high-performing team? Chris Warner defines a High-Performing team as follows: “They outperform their peers, even if they have fewer resources.” What does it take to have a high-performing team? It is seamless and like a well-oiled machine to an outsider. We will peel back the layers and discuss why these teams outperform their peers. There are seven critical characteristics of a high-performing team that are closely interwoven. This presentation will consist of a brief review of all the characteristics. The attendees will be in small groups to discuss the athletic mindset for most of the second half of the session. The last part will be when the attendees gather to share thoughts from their groups.

Join us for Happy Hour with The Hatch Group!

It's great that culture is discussed more and more, but mere conversations harbor too much ambiguity. Let’s discuss the templates and the rhythm that shape culture of discipline, empathy, and collaboration. The right documentation in a simple synchronization converts a communication traffic jam into a communication symphony. The right documentation, governed correctly, qualifies as a love letter to your future team. This session formulates what it means to collaborate better than anyone else.

It’s common to hear casual references to the performing arts; e.g. “winging it” resembles Improv, “customer journey” resembles theater, and “singing from the same hymnal” resembles music. Let’s exercise these culture traits via a dance lesson and improv games, then discuss how the culture traits build a collaborative advantage for our teams. Imitating the performing arts shapes a culture of high discipline and high empathy.

As organizational, and role-specific business and system requirements grow ever more sophisticated, layered, dependent upon digital experience delivery, and likely to change over time, solution delivery teams need to be ever better at planning and implementing resilient, flexible, and maintainable data architectures. Analysts, Product Owners, and Architects serve critical roles in advocating for and stewarding practical ways to embed focus on data quality assurance measures into an organization's operating model.