Once a BA, always a BA

 

Having some background doing business or systems analysis work, I find myself using my prior BA skills all the time as a project manager.  I’ve also seen project managers who are highly efficient because they demonstrate BA skills in nearly everything they do.  PMs have a core duty to communicate understanding, and I’ve found the best examples of this involve taking disparate inputs, categorizing the inputs into a framework, building a visual of this framework, and socializing the visual in advance of formal presentation.  The ability to do this comes from a PM’s business analysis roots, which boil down to the following core skills:

Progressive elaboration:  Being assigned a new project can feel like initiating a “study”.  PMs seldom get handed a project at just the right time with just the right inputs.  We normally get fragments of progress when first assigned a project:  work that is partially complete, work that is complete but didn’t need to be complete, work that’s yet to be started but needed to start, etc.  Assembling these fragments into a framework of planning can feel like we are on a treasure hunt.  We peel back layers of the onion to come up with the proper sequence of work to be performed, decisions yet to be made, dependencies on other projects, scope to be defined and stakeholder confusion to clarify.  By undergoing this “study” as a BA would, we feel like we are in the military service:  we get paid to learn!

Analytical skills/critical thinking:  There is some level of analysis needed in putting all the pieces into a plan.  Task pre-requisites need to be sanity-checked and confirmed.  Items that need to be researched early in the project must be driven to resolution.  There’s the ever-present responsibility of due diligence.  The best of BAs do not just record requirements like a court stenographer, but instead apply some degree of analysis and application to a framework.  As PMs we don’t just capture tasks to type into our plans.  The high-stakes environment in which we perform projects today mandates some level of critical thinking and active analysis in everything we do.

Visualization:  This is the ability to take the results of our elaboration, analysis and planning and build visuals, so all stakeholders have a detailed understanding of the plans and any hindrances to the plan.  How many project meetings have you attended where the bulk of time is spent understanding the plan vs. evaluating the plan?  With effective visuals and explanations, the PM can quickly achieve universal understanding, and move the meeting’s focus to what truly needs dialogue:  validation and critique.  BAs are superior at visualization, as are professional trainers and teachers.  And since our world has moved away from paper and pencil, the best visualizers I know are highly PC literate.  For visualization, you can get a lot of mileage out the simplest of Microsoft tools that you likely have on your PC right now:  Excel and Powerpoint.  I use MS Project for predecessor management and calculations, but I always find myself building Gantt charts in Excel.  I’m sure MS Project has great reporting features, but creating bars over merged cells and color-coding them affords me the flexibility to communicate the exact message, with pinpoint accuracy and universality of understanding.

If you’ve never been a BA, no worries.  Even performing the basics of elaborating, analyzing and visualizing will make you a more effective project manager, and indeed a better general manager as well!