There’s No Such Thing as 'The Business Context'

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Business Analysis   Business Case  

I have been writing and speaking about the importance of business understanding for PMs for many years. It’s something that I am passionate about, and that I believe is critically important both for project managers and teams—and for the organizations they support.

But I am as guilty as anyone else of talking about the “business context” or the “business purpose” of a project. And that’s a problem, because there is no such thing.

What I mean by that is that there isn’t a singular context or purpose, there are multiple ones. If we only consider one perspective, then we are only getting part of the story. Here’s a really simple example to explain what I mean.

Suppose that we are developing a new system for an internal operations group. The requirements have been defined and approved, and the project is ready to start. There have been several conversations between the PM and key stakeholders, and the project manager understands that it is critical for this new system to eliminate some of the risk that the organization is exposed to because of the current partially manual processes, and to facilitate better collaboration across different operational areas by breaking down some of the information silos that currently exist. So far, so good, right?

But suppose that the internal customer doesn’t really think that …

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