Tell me a bit about the book.

The Promotable Business Analyst is about helping business analyst professionals discover and take the next step in their career. Like the project management role, the business analyst role varies widely across organizations and this can make career development a real challenge. The eBook starts with a section on how to start improving your career in small ways, then explores career paths within business analysis, and ends with a section on doing all the normal job-related activities in a career-oriented way. Each part contains a guidebook and multiple worksheets and templates that the reader can use to apply what they read about to their career development. In all there is over 150 pages of guidebook content and 20 worksheets and templates.

How would a project manager find this useful?

From what I’ve been hearing, a lot of project managers are doing business analysis work. We spoke a bit about this last week in the post “Does your PM job include BA work?”.  The Promotable Business Analyst is all about helping you be more career-minded about this sort of activity. It would support a project manager in completing a brief competency assessment of their BA skills and creating a career plan that builds on these skills. We also go into a discussion of combined BA/PM roles, considering both their strengths and weaknesses in terms of individual career progression.

What if a PM is not doing BA work?

To be honest, many of the concepts in The Promotable Business Analyst are universal. And since so much of what project managers and business analyst do is closely related, even the PM who is not looking to build a BA career could find large pieces of value in the content. For example, in part 3 we discuss ways to prepare for a job performance review by completing a self-evaluation of your recent project history. In Part 1, we discuss the pros and cons of various professional development opportunities and provide an in-depth discussion of in-person and online networking as part of your career development. Part 2 is mainly an overview of the types of BA roles that exist today. This could help a PM gain a broader understanding of the BA role and how variations in the role in any given organization might impact their project.

What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to a PM advancing their career?

A lot of professionals tend to separate professional development activities and the work they do every day. As a PM or a BA, your projects are your opportunities to advance and build new experiences. Many of the barriers we find to professional development, such as lack of funds for training, disappear when we start to think about our project experiences as professional development opportunities.  Combine this with a few free webinars, a reference book on a technique, and some informal peer support and you’ve got a low cost, but effective professional development strategy. So, my advice is to develop a career-oriented mindset about your work. This can take the form of practicing a new technique, integrating a new practice, or just working on your soft skills, such as listening, in your next meeting. Every project experience, big or small, is an opportunity to learn something new. Don’t waste it!

My second piece of advice is to just get started. As a PM, you are probably used to helping others get unblocked so they can finish a task. You use all kinds of tools to help others plan, prepare, and implement. Do you apply these techniques to your career? I wrote a blog post about how to take the stress out of career advancement and the basic message was, just take one small step. And then take another and another and another. Each step doesn’t have to be 100% perfect, just try something and see how it works. Unlike a project, there’s rarely a fixed deadline for your career. Getting started in a direction is the best possible way to make things happen quickly.

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It’s no secret that business analysis and project management roles tend to blend together in their work on IT and business change efforts. We also find that business analysts naturally take on project management responsibilities and project managers naturally take on business analyst responsibilities, especially in cases where one of these roles is absent or weak within an organization.

In response to an earlier post I published here about “How not to choke your business analyst” a reader rightly commented that I made the assumption that PMs understand the business analyst role. I’d like to address that question directly, as well as provide a few clues for project managers to discover that they might also be business analysts.

What is a business analyst?

According to IIBA:

“A business analyst works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. The business analyst understands business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements and recommends solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.”[1]

Most commonly, the business analyst role includes a significant subset of the following areas of responsibility:

• Planning the requirements approach for a project;
• Enterprise analysis (pre-project analysis including a business case or business value statements)
• Eliciting requirements from stakeholders;
• Analyzing and specifying requirements;
• Validating the requirements are complete and correct;
• Managing requirements through traceability;
• Communicating the requirements to the implementation team;
• Organizational change management for accepting the solution.

This is a long list of potential responsibilities. Not all business analysts fulfill all elements of the business analyst role. I suspect as a project manager you’ve likely been asked to take on bits and pieces of this role at some point in your career.

The relationship between business analysis and project management roles

Even when distinct, our roles are invariably intertwined.  As Steve Blais offers the following statement to clarify the distinction between business analysts and project managers in a blog post titled “The Janus Relationship”:

“The business analyst is determining what must be done to successfully solve the business problem brought forth by the business community.  The project manager is determining how to efficiently solve the problem in a timely fashion. Acting in the role of doorkeeper, the project manager protects the project team from attention draining interruptions and the business analyst filters changes, issues and problems that emanate from the business community.  Those issues that the business analyst does not filter out are then filtered by the project manager based on schedule, budget and feasibility. “

In a perfect world, the project management and business analysis responsibilities are held by two individuals who collaborate together but also balance each other out. But in the real world, distinctions between these two roles are blurred and many of us find ourselves taking on additional responsibilities outside our core role.

I’m a project manager….but also a business analyst?

Even if your title is “project manager” and you associate yourself with the project management discipline, you might be doing some business analysis if:

• You find yourself having multiple discussions about scope with stakeholders.
• You find yourself identifying stakeholders or subject matter experts to ensure all perspectives are appropriately represented in the project’s requirements.
• You review project documentation from the business and have a long list of questions to flesh out the details in a concrete way. You help the business discover answers to these questions.
• You initiate or participate in questions about business value and help stakeholders participate in discussions about how to prioritize their requirements.
• You ask “why” to ensure that your projects deliver a real business value and solve a real business problem.
• You create project documentation about the “what” of the project, including requirements or specifications.
• You participate in helping the business stakeholders prepare to integrate the new solution into their work. This could involve user acceptance testing, business process mapping, or training.

This is not an exhaustive list, but I hope it provides a sense of the types of activities business analysts tend to hold in their various job roles. In essence, the business analyst is focused on solving a business problem and the business analyst does this through developing requirements. Business analysis, like project management, is part art and part science. There are many tools and practices that can be used to become a better business analyst, but there is also an art of communicating with the right people and about the right topics at the right times to ensure your project can be successful.

If you are interested in learning more, I’m releasing my second eBook The Promotable Business Analyst on July 8. Sign-up for the early bird list and download “3 Career Habits of Successful Business Analysts”.

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[1]http://www.theiiba.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Becoming_a_BA&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=4377

Image by ryantron. via Flickr

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In an ideal world, the business analyst and project manager work seamlessly together to help the business achieve the most valuable solution.

The ideal world rarely happens.

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