The Wellington leg of the IIBA Festival of Business Analysis runs as a full-day, three-stream conference at Te Wharewaka o Pōneke on Monday 19 October 2026 — not 1 October as the directory had it. The naming-rights sponsor has also changed name: SoftEd now trades as Skills Development Group.
The Wellington edition of the Festival of Business Analysis 2026 is a one-day, in-person conference at Te Wharewaka o Pōneke Wharewaka Function Centre on Taranaki Wharf on Monday 19 October 2026. The official festival site lists registration opening at 8:30am for a 9:00am start, a closing plenary finishing at 5:00pm and a post-event networking session in the Wharewaka Cafe from 5:30pm to 7:00pm. It is one stop on a trans-Tasman circuit: the organisers run three days of online programming from Monday 12 to Wednesday 14 October, then a week of in-person days across Australia and New Zealand — Perth and Wellington on 19 October, Adelaide and Auckland on 20 October, Melbourne on 21 October, Brisbane on 22 October and Sydney on 23 October. Wellington shares the opening day of the in-person week with Perth.
The festival's own site states plainly that the 2026 IIBA Festival of Business Analysis is organised by IIBA Australia in partnership with IIBA New Zealand, with the Wellington ticketing listing published by the IIBA New Zealand Chapter. The International Institute of Business Analysis describes itself on the same site as a non-profit professional association serving the field of business analysis and maintaining global standards and certifications for the practice. Conference management is handled by Conference Design, the Hobart-based PCO named in the site footer.
The most significant change for anyone holding an older record is the naming-rights sponsor. The event has run for years as the "IIBA SoftEd Festival of Business Analysis"; the 2026 event is titled the IIBA Skills Development Group Festival of Business Analysis. The festival's 2026 sponsors page explains the continuity: Skills Development Group, powered by SoftEd, is described there as a professional development and capability provider with more than three decades of experience in Asia-Pacific, with contributions to IIBA's Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) and specialised BA certification programmes. So SoftEd has not gone away — it has been folded into a renamed parent brand. New Zealand national sponsors listed for 2026 are the financial-services consultancy Mosaic and the recruitment firm Walker Smith.
The festival has a long run behind it. The site's own archive carries full programmes for 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, with Wellington programmes present in each of the recent years, making 2026 a well-established repeat booking rather than a first outing.
The organisers pitch FoBA 2026 at business analysts and IT delivery professionals under the theme "Adapt. Align. Accelerate.", framing it for "experienced practitioners navigating complex environments" rather than beginners. The published Wellington programme is a genuine three-stream day across the Mākaro, Te Puni and Matiu rooms. It opens with Jared Gorai on "Drowning in Data, Starving for Judgement" and a plenary from Stu Van Rij, then splits into concurrent workshops including Vaughan Luckman on the evolving BA landscape, Greg Ng on BA career growth in the age of AI, Hazra Ali on governance-driven delivery, Raj Jonnalagedda on context and AI, and a storytelling workshop from Jamie Bell and Matt Duce. Two panels bookend the day — "Agents of Change in Disguise" moderated by Jay Du, and "Same Job, New Toolkit: The BA Skillset in the Age of Copilot" moderated by Dr Alvaro Orsi with Shane Hastie among the panellists. The 2026 IIBA Australia and New Zealand Business Analysis Awards finalists are announced from the Wellington stage at 4:30pm, with closing remarks from Shane Hastie and Tara Sutherland. An online programme add-on is offered alongside the in-person ticket, so the format is best described as in-person with a separate online stream, not hybrid streaming of the Wellington room itself.
Te Wharewaka o Pōneke sits at Taranaki Wharf, 2 Taranaki Street, on the Wellington waterfront. The venue's own site describes the Mākaro Room — the festival's plenary space — as its largest room at 215 square metres, seating 250 theatre-style, 200 banquet including the gallery, 140 cabaret and 300 for cocktails, with harbour views and indoor-outdoor flow. The Te Puni and Matiu rooms carry the concurrent streams, and the on-site Wharewaka Cafe hosts the evening networking. That room inventory puts the realistic Wellington delegate ceiling in the low hundreds.
On delegate movement, the venue states it is a two-minute walk from Te Papa and about five minutes from the central city, which places almost the entire Wellington CBD hotel stock within walking distance along the waterfront and Courtenay Place. The festival's venue page notes parking is available across the road at the Cable Street Tournament Car Park and directs delegates to the Metlink Journey Planner for public transport. Wellington Airport is on the same side of the city, a short drive around the harbour. The venue also offers cultural services with mana whenua Te Ātiawa ki Te Whanganui a Tara, including pōwhiri and mihi whakatau in the Mākaro Room — relevant context given the Wellington programme opens with a welcome and karakia.
FoBA is the anchor date in the Australian and New Zealand business analysis calendar, and the Wellington leg gives the capital's large public-sector and financial-services BA community a full conference day without crossing the Tasman. Its structure is instructive for the New Zealand MICE market: a single association event that spreads seven city-days and a three-day online block across two countries, each city sized to a mid-scale function centre rather than a convention centre. For Wellington venues, it is exactly the repeat, single-day, association-led booking that fills shoulder-season Mondays.
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