Business Analysis/Project Management Seams

 

I'm managing an interesting project.  It is a new business line that we are bringing up out of the ground.  Therefore there are some predictive elements (i.e. construction, development, testing, fielding of systems), and there are some iterative elements (mobile development, enterprise data warehouse integration).  These projects are rolling up into a really cool program.  When you combine this with a maturing PMO concept, there is alot of change going on at once.  An additional change was that the business analyst on our team was out for two months.  Guess who that job fell to in his absence?  If you could see me right now I'm in my chair leaning back with two thumbs pointing right at me!

I quickly had to understand the need for business analysis, the interface with the customer, the accounting department and the HR department as well as stakeholders in IT.  Whereas before I just need to worry about the "what" to do regarding the deliverables, the tasks and the milestones, now I had to be concerned with the "why" as well.  Here is a perfect example of a seam--I'm well versed and experienced with process maps to determine the major muscle movements about what needs to happen in business processes.  However, without the BA I needed to delve down deeper into behavior designed development (BDD) frameworks so that we would be ready for detailed testing of our solution.  I didn't understand until now how important it was for every possible interaction a user of a system could accomplish that there needed to be a specifically designed business outcome to assign to that action.  I see this as a potential area for further collaboration and knowledge creation between the BA and PM communities.

What do you think?