Jul

4

Do You Need a Business Analyst and a Project Manager?

July 4, 2006 |

I’ve been hearing this question a lot lately, as the IIBA starts to formalize the BA role.

In my view, it’s the wrong question.

The question arises because people are confusing job titles with team roles. Let’s rephrase the question: does a project need people filling the project management and business analysis roles? Put that way the answer is clearly yes.


Project management and business analysis are very different functions. Go take a look at the Project Management Body of Knowledge. I’ve read it several times in the course of getting my PMP and developing courses for Humber College. Project management, as a discipline, is about how to get something done. It deals with breaking down the work, assigning the work, monitoring the work to ensure it gets done, and managing new work when it gets assigned. However, almost nothing in the PM BoK describes how to ensure that the right work is being done.

You know why? One reason is that project management, as a discipline, originated in defence contracting and construction. In those fields, what is to be built was determined by engineers and architects. There was never any suggestion that the PM “owned” the design. It’s only IT that blurs the issue, and that’s because IT companies select their PMs from a group of people who typically have been used to being involved in the design of the solution (that is, developers or business analysts).

The point is this: you can pick up a textbook on project management, and master the skills associated with it, while never being particularly concerned with what is being done. Yes, a good project manager, one who can genuinely lead a team rather than just being an administrator, will be capable of playing multiple roles on a team and use those skills to inform his or her project management decisions.

By contrast, the discipline of Business Analysis, and the BA BoK, is almost exclusively focused on how to develop the requirements for a solution and how to verify that the proposed solution is in alignment with the overall strategy of the corporation. How the actual solution is built is not part of that, nor is the process of verifying that what was built is in compliance with the requirements.

Is that a good thing? Yes and no. For the purposes of defining the skill set that we describe in the BA BoK, it is a good thing. It lets us put boundaries around what we’re doing and agree that certain skills and knowledge are not needed in the BoK. We can do that by asking whether we can see someone without the core skills of a business analyst doing that job. Some companies require business analysts to be able to code–but in terms of the discipline, we can and do view that as a business analyst who also has the skills of a programmer. I can and have acted as a project manager, QA lead, trainer, product manager, strategic planner, and front-line tech support–but just because I can do those things doesn’t make them part of business analysis. Similarly, many project managers have business analysis skills, but that doesn’t make business analysis the same thing as project management. They are compatible but not identical disciplines.

So if we agree that a project needs a person in a project management role, and a person in the business analysis role, then the question is can they be the same person? The answer, of course, is that it depends on your project, and the methodology used for the project, and the people involved. Personally, I lean towards the position that they should be separate roles in most cases, but there are times when it will make sense to combine them.


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