The Project Manager/Business Analyst: Superman or Supermistake?

Parag is a project manager with more than eight years of experience managing complex multi-country and multi-year projects involving remote teams and numerous stakeholders.

  Requirements Management  

Traditionally, a project team for a software project would have a project manager, a business analyst, a number of developers, a couple of testers and sometimes onsite engineers.

However, with increasing costs and growing competition--and in a bid to be competent and keep their operations lean—organizations (especially the smaller companies) have overlapping roles within the team. Developers sometimes double up as testers (there is a debate about whether this is justified, but it is a topic for another post).

More commonly, we also see the project manager and business analyst rolled into one. For some, it is a natural merger of roles; for others, it is a recipe for disaster. Let’s look at what it means to have or be a project manager/business analyst--and its pros and cons.

First, let’s look at the individual roles and their unique attributes. The project manager is the captain of the ship, and is also the face of the project to the outside world. The project manager’s main responsibility is managing the project resources and schedule to meet the project objective. They also decide on a work plan, task allocation, negotiate with clients on time and resources, monitor the project budget and many similar tasks--some of which are even administrative in nature.

The key skills that the project manager must possess and use continuously are people …

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