Don't Be Trivial

Kathleen Ryan O'Connor - September 10, 2009

Leadership Stakeholder Management ProjectsAtWork

Have the roles of project manager and business analyst become trivialized? Yes, thanks to “preposterous, ponderous” paperwork, according to former CIO and current business agilist Michael Hugos. Here he elaborates on his provocative view, including the five questions that every project leader should be focusing on getting answered, instead.

By his own admission, Michael Hugos likes to be provocative. So he was surely pleased when his recent blog posting on CIO.com garnered a flurry of debate with dozens of commenters weighing in with their own experience. In "The Sorry State of Project Managers and Business Analysts", Hugos states that most project managers seem to be doing little more than "project bookkeeping and updating preposterous, often ponderous and usually incomprehensible documents politely referred to as project plans and progress reports."

Same for business analysts. They've become, Hugos argues, "people who are little more than note-takers at rambling meetings (think of every Dilbert comic strip you’ve ever seen) who attempt to use their notes to create requirements [by way of] long, wordy documents too technical for business people to understand and not technical enough for programmers to work from."

Hugos is a speaker, writer and practitioner of Agile development methods. He …

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